linHDD - 0.4


For those a bit weary of the commandline, perhaps a bit miffed by big problems caused by little typos -- but mostly for the many newcomers that have yet to memorize the multitude of wondrous console-based commands, I give you this tool to ease your life just a little bit.

View properties, partition, format or test speed 
of IDE, SATA drives and USB sticks under Linux.

by Paul Sherman

The latest release includes the ability to view, test and partition SATA drives. (I finally got one and am able to test.) It can also format your USB sticks for you if you have mkdosfs on your system.

linHDD acts as a fontend for some basic Linux tools, which should all be on your machine already. hdparm gives the detailed drive information shown in the large textbox. Also enables testing the HDD read speed in MB/s. df, (which lists mounted devices), mkfs and its relatives for formatting (supporting ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs -- if they are supported on your machine.) And cfdisk pops up if you choose to partition a drive.

For safety and sanity I designed linHDD so that it will not allow any partitioning on a mounted Hard Drive. Nor will it allow formatting on a mounted partition. And lastly, ANY partitioning or formatting must be done as root. linHDD will only function when run as root on some systems. Below is a shot of the response when trying to partition a drive when one of its partitions was already mounted.






You can run linHDD as user (as opposed to root) and check out your drive space, all the detailed drive information in the textbox and even run the speed tests. You simply won't be able to format or partition.

0.4 release now includes a customized version of fdisk (called abs_fdisk). Why? Well, daealing with SATA (scsi) in /proc was a bear -- and the ease with which fdisk gave me the needed drive info made me wish I could use fdisk. Just that on Slackware and Absolute, which I use, you can only run fdisk as root. Sooooo -- I downloaded util-linux and changed the source code for fdisk so that it would not srite anythig to drives, just return the drive info. Renamed it abs_fdisk (because I wrote it sort of specifically for Absolute Linux, and Eureka!, Use fdisk as non-root user safely.

  Dependencies for the source and Slackware distributions are:

GTK+2-2.6
Python-2.4
pyGTK-2.6
Pango

Also needs the utilities hdparm, fdisk, mkdosfs (to format USB sticks to vfat) and abs_fdisk (included -- if the compiled version does not work for your system, you can compile util-linuz 2.12r yourself and rename fdisk to abs_fdisk and stick it in your path. I include my modified fdisk.c and MCONFIG to keep it safe.)


I hope you enjoy the software. If you have any problems or suggestions, don't hesitate to email me at psherma1@rochester.rr.com.