A good HDD checker needed

  • Thread starter Thread starter Gabriel Knight
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Gabriel Knight

Hi I need to check a few laptop HDD's as one I have is bad and that one
seemed good for a clean install of XP but it freezed during an windows
update so I used HDDscan from http://hddscan.com/ but ive never used it
before so as to is it a good one I dont know. It found heaps of bad sections
so I stoped removed the HDD and put in another one I need to check but Ive
only used the old dos chkdsk (from a floppy disk) with a surface scan for
bad clusters but it could not read NTFS so I need help to use a good
checker. I used my XP install disk to run repair console with chkdsk /r but
I just need a checker either as a boot disk or within windows XP Home to
show me what if any bad clusters exist. Thank you all, GK.
 
Hi I need to check a few laptop HDD's as one I have is bad and that one
seemed good for a clean install of XP but it freezed during an windows
update so I used HDDscan fromhttp://hddscan.com/but ive never used it
before so as to is it a good one I dont know. It found heaps of bad sections
so I stoped removed the HDD and put in another one I need to check but Ive
only used the old dos chkdsk (from a floppy disk) with a surface scan for
bad clusters but it could not read NTFS so I need help to use a good
checker. I used my XP install disk to run repair console with chkdsk /r but
I just need a checker either as a boot disk or within windows XP Home to
show me what if any bad clusters exist. Thank you all, GK.
Click to expand...

Several, although get the model ID# and reference that to the
manufacturer for their utilities. A thorough approach if perhaps not
cursorily to limping along with a failing HD or attempting to retrieve
data if so indicated. It's always to me an all or nothing state -
either the HD is acceptable or it is not. I simply don't like losing
at craps. Found a Russian utility if you'd like (although an
misguided attempt when I was working on "green drives" in USB docks to
control hibernation codes when interacting with "black drives" in
other USB docks). Interesting program. . .

HDDScan for Windows
Ver. 3.3
Author: Artem Rubtsov
Support sites:
Russian: http://hddscan.ru/
English: http://hddscan.com/
 
Gabriel said:
Hi I need to check a few laptop HDD's as one I have is bad and that
one seemed good for a clean install of XP but it freezed during an
windows update so I used HDDscan from http://hddscan.com/ but ive
never used it before so as to is it a good one I dont know. It found
heaps of bad sections so I stoped removed the HDD and put in another
one I need to check but Ive only used the old dos chkdsk (from a
floppy disk) with a surface scan for bad clusters but it could not
read NTFS so I need help to use a good checker. I used my XP install
disk to run repair console with chkdsk /r but I just need a checker
either as a boot disk or within windows XP Home to show me what if
any bad clusters exist. Thank you all, GK.
Click to expand...

HirensBootCD (HBCD) will give you various HDD utilities
It can be used iether from within Windows or Self-booted from CD.
http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/

Don't be tricked into downloading anything but HBCD, the link for said is
about 3/4 down the page.
Or for a direct link to required file use;
http://www.hirensbootcd.org/files/Hirens.BootCD.15.1.zip
 
Hi I need to check a few laptop HDD's as one I have is bad
and that one seemed good for a clean install of XP but it
freezed during an windows update so I used HDDscan from
http://hddscan.com/ but ive never used it before so as to
is it a good one I dont know. It found heaps of bad sections
so I stoped removed the HDD and put in another one I need to
check but Ive only used the old dos chkdsk (from a floppy disk)
with a surface scan for bad clusters but it could not read NTFS
so I need help to use a good checker.
Click to expand...

Don't let any diagnostic write to the HD if there's any valuable data
on it. That means don't do even run any read/write tests, just read
tests. Even CHKDSK can write to the HD and cause data loss.

There's the self-booting version of HDDscan, called MHDD:

http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

Another self-booting HD diagnostic is HDAT2. Seagate's SeaTools
is available in a version that can boot from a floppy or USB flash
drive, and it works on non-Seagate drives.

MHDD and HDAT2 may have trouble with HDs over 1TB, especially in
regards to running SMART tests (they don't seem to run).

I use the surface scan feature of MHDD to find marginal sectors.
HDDscan can do that, too, but it gives a lot of false positive,
probably because of the overhead of Windows. It's not unusual to
find a few sectors that take 10-20 retries (over 150 milliseconds)
before they can be read, and I don't think this is because of
defects on the platters because WD drives rarely show anything
needing over 50ms, while perfectly good Samsungs, Seagates, and
some Hitachis show anywhere from 1-10 sectors per terabyte.
 
Try one of them linux distros which boot from a cd or dvd.

(I think the one I used was: mint 11, and also knoppix)

Some of them have a neat tool, disk something...

It reads SMART data and such and gives much more detailed information about
disk than windows...

For windows special tools exist, but linux is free ! ;)

If you need a more thorough scan of file system than that's what chkdsk is
for a windows command line tool that comes with windows.

Bye,
Skybuck.
 
Hi I need to check a few laptop HDD's as one I have is bad and that one
seemed good for a clean install of XP but it freezed during an windows
update so I used HDDscan from http://hddscan.com/ but ive never used it
before so as to is it a good one I dont know. It found heaps of bad sections
so I stoped removed the HDD and put in another one I need to check but Ive
only used the old dos chkdsk (from a floppy disk) with a surface scan for
bad clusters but it could not read NTFS so I need help to use a good
checker. I used my XP install disk to run repair console with chkdsk /r but
I just need a checker either as a boot disk or within windows XP Home to
show me what if any bad clusters exist. Thank you all, GK.
Click to expand...

The best HDD checker is always the one built into the hard drive itself,
otherwise known as SMART. Most HDD utilities these days just read out
the SMART values and determine the health of the HDD based on that info.
HDDScan should be fine, as it also reads the SMART values. I would also
recommend Hard Disk Sentinel, which amalgamates all of the relevant
SMART values and gives you a rating going from 0 to 100% on how healthy
your disks are. You don't have to register it, but the registered
versions have more features enabled, but for basic checking of the
disk's health, just use the non-registered version it's fine.

http://www.hdsentinel.com/

Yousuf Khan
 
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