low-level format before install?

[Geoff Fritz]

On Tue, Apr 07, 2009 at 05:41:27PM -0400, John Almberg wrote:
> Thanks for all the tips. At least I have something to start with.
> 
> The guys in the data center reinstalled FreeBSD (the filesystem was  
> totally corrupted again), and then ran what they called "SMART test",  
> which might be smartctl, and said the hard drives look good.
> 
> I am now able to get back in.
> 
> So the system ran fine until I put a load on it with the database  
> (many transactions a second). This corrupted the file system again.
> 
> So I guess I need to load it enough to produce error messages  
> (hopefully) but not enough to destroy the file system again.

I've had issues with a few hosted servers, and more often than not, it was
a bad PSU on the server and/or rack.

Assuming that you can't get these folks to run a good hardware diag for
you, there are a few things you can do.  You can beat up the RAM/cpu with
various burn-in programs (I like benchmarks/stream for its simplicity --
you'll need to "make extract", customize, then ,"make install" for your own
memory size).  You can thrash the disks pretty well with either dd or
"badblocks" from sysutils/e2fsprogs, both can be non-destructive.

-- Geoff