Hi guys.

I'm looking for a tool which will allow me to connect up 4 SATA drives to a intel motherboard I have spare. Then boot from USB etc and carry out a surface test on each drive one at a time, outputting the status (fail / sucess etc) to RAM disk or USB text file.

For anyone who has used it before, something similar to how DBAN works with multiple drives would be great but anything I can script and leave to do its thing over night would be great. I've asked about this on a few general IT forums in the past and never really got anywhere with it.

I've 20+ 80GB HDD's to surface scan and would really like to avoid doing them one at a time

thanks

You could use a command-line tool and create a batch file for a DOS boot disk. Have you tried that?

The Linux distros for repair work that I've see, have programs that take parameters from scripts. All you would need is to identify ahead of time what the device names would be. sda/hda/...
It's also possible to them at the same time using multitasking but I'm not sure how stable that would be. I've not had to format multiple drives like you're wanting to do, in a looooooong time!

The tools that I've seen let you specify a log file's name or append to the end of it.