If you don't have the luxury of having a dedicated machine to run SpinRite to scan hardrives, perhaps this recipe will help you. It only scans drives through the USB interface, which is (at least) one layer removed from the ATA layer, but its better than nothing, and anecdotely it seems to work.

Since the virtual machine requires access to the raw usb decices, you'll probably need to run the following recipe as a privilaged user, i.e. root.

Time to sing the praises of Netris.

tl;dr🔗

ssh netris.rocketnine.space

Back in college, the other Computer Science lab rats and I played a lot of xtris while "studying". It was a wonderful multi-player tetris game where completing 2 or more lines would send a bunch of junk to another player, similar to the classic gameboy version of tetirs. Back in the early 2000's it was a pretty fun game. The number of players was only limited to the horizontal resolution on your screen. In the recent quarantine environment, we wanted to revisit our glory years of hanging out in the computer of Lab of the basement sub-basement of the Computer Science building, but sadly, xtris has been defunct for many years.

I love tmux and screen and byobu -- which uses screen or tmux as backends -- for terminal work. I suggested these utilities to my co-workers. These are great utilities which allow you ssh into a machine and preserve your ssh sessions even after you log out, or loose your internet connection.

I use iterm2 on my laptop for ssh (in fact, it's the app I spend most of my time using). Iterm2 has integration for tmux so you can open new Iterm2 tabs through a remote tmux session as if there local iterm2 tabs.

But there is a pesky issue in Iterm2 regarding tmux support, the dreaded, aggressive-resize error.