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A long time ago, I worked for a company that had a neat in-house utility that did something very simple. It's allowed you to write a file at a size you specify. It would then read that file back and check it for errors. You could write the file to a local disk, a mapped network share, or a UNC path (presuming you had permissions, of course).

Using this utility, I was able to narrow down the source of very intermittent file corruption one day. (Turned out an on-board DRAM module in a RAID produced an occasional memory error.)

I would really, really like to get some utility that performs this same function. I am not asking for the utility this company produced, but rather something that does a similar function.

Edit: I prefer a Windows utility. CLI is fine.

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Hrm. Without some obviously bad ram to test, I'm wondering if this might work...

 # will create a 10MB file. Adjust as necessary
 dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/file bs=1M count=10 

 cp /path/to/file /path/to/other/file

 md5sum /path/to/file /path/to/other/file

At this point, both files should have the same md5sum.

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  • Not a bad idea. I should have specified I hope to do it in Winders. :-(
    – tcv
    Jun 28, 2010 at 20:46
  • You could get dd for windows via cygwin cygwin.org
    – gm3dmo
    Jun 28, 2010 at 21:06
  • I will do that if I can't find a Win32 option. I'd have to install this on a production server to do some testing so I want to minimize changes to the environment as much as possible, if that makes sense.
    – tcv
    Jun 28, 2010 at 21:08
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    @tcv MSYS will give you enough of a shell to do this with: mingw.org/wiki/MSYS - I'd also suggest reading from /dev/urandom so that you're not just testing "copy zero, ten million times", which may work when real files fail.
    – Andrew
    Jun 29, 2010 at 2:53
  • When you say "reading from /dev/urandom," do you mean to create a file from /dev/urandom? Such as dd if=/dev/urandom of=/path/to/sexy/randomized/file bs=1M count=10 ??
    – tcv
    Jun 29, 2010 at 21:21

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