How Can I Check for Hard Drive Damage? - Comments Page 1

try software to check drives
http://www.hdsentinel.com/
or
CrystalDiskInfo from
http://download.cnet.com/CrystalDiskInfo/3000-2086_4-10832082.html

I'm getting an sound like scratching or extreme reading and writing to the hard drive. This noise is new. Does it indicate impending doom?

Spinrite is an excellent hard drive recovery program, by Steve Gibson.

What happens if your data is corrupted somehow either by a hard drive that is failing or a program error and a backup program grabs that corrupt file. Is there any way of knowing or getting a warning when a hard drive isn't writing the data to the drive that it should be or if that data is corrupt. I'm thinking here of specific files.

Also, what do you think about Spinrite for extending lives of drives? I've heard some say it's snake oil and some who say it works by re-writing data where its magnetic imprint is failing.

I have been so lucky to be able to ask Bob Rankin ?s about my computer problems and will stick with his knowledge as I get my answers. I think this is one of the best articles yet. I have done alot of reading on hard drives and what to look for when I think I am having problems. Well, 2 nights ago I was attempting to work with photos and I got the dreaded screen that pops up and tells you, you may have hard disk problems, tells you to restart your computer and then offers 4 things for you to try. It was at this point I remember reading one of Bob's articles on hard drives indicating an external hard drive to back up everything, went out, purchased one and started working for several hours. This article on "How Can I Check for Hard Drive Damage" just confirms everything I have been reading and what I did last night to back everything up. I would like to make a booklet out of Bob's articles to be able to share with others in the family as they have ?s but I think I will just introduce them to Bob's articles of help.

Seagate has a cool free app that will provide a comprehensive diagnostic scan your HDD and advise you of any potential problems or potential failures of your hard drive. Its called Sea Tools. Its easy to use, works great and its free. Can be had at www.seagate.com

Bob -

From the article: "The tests and repairs will take a significant amount of time on a large hard drive; go to lunch or happy hour. When the tests for hard drive damage end, Windows will restart automatically."

If the machine is configured to go into hibernation or sleep mode, do these settings have to be disabled for chkdsk to run all the way through?

Great article!
Along the same vein of bad drive / crashed drive, maybe you could cover some of the free HD /data recovery SW out there that you could personally recommend in a future article? There are SO many it would be nice to be able to know which one to go to in that time of need.
Thanks.

SpinRite (available at www.grc.com) software that can check your existing hard drive and/or recover most of the time from a crash. I've used it a few times on my system and while it might take up to 24 hours to recover data it is a big bang for your buck.

The author, Steve Gibson, used his newsgroups to test it prior to publishing it; I know as I was among 200 people testing. Covers all most every conceivable hard drive and I believe it is still only $69.95 with full tech support.

Best,

Jay

After checking on the integrity of From what I recallmy hard drive, how do I view the report?

EDITOR'S NOTE: From what I recall, after the scan runs, there is a button that says "View Report" or something similar.

I ran the Hard Drive check you recommended and it took quite a while to check the hard drive and then
after all that, I did not get a report.
Is there a place that I can check to see what the results of the check were??

Thanks for everything.
Fred

Bob,
I am so thankful for your time with the newsletter and posting for Macs, too! Thankyou again and again 'cause I love learning and trusting from you!!

Hello everyone:

Probably the biggest user of hard drives is Google. They use A LOT of standard, off-the-shelf drives.

Back in 2007 they wrote a research paper on their experience with disk failures. If you've got nothing to do on a rainy afternoon, go to:

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

It's a bit technical in some spots but you can just skip over these.

Surprisingly, they found that temperature and activity levels were much less correlated with drive failures than previously reported.

Regards,
Ihor

I've used Spinrite on a few older drives I which had Windows Me and XP on them and it worked well but the latest version of Spinrite (6.0) seems to have a 500 GB size HD limit before it runs into an unrecoverable error. It is also unable to work on any solid state device rendering it obsolete for the new generation of data storage. I hope Steve Gibson is in the process of updating his software.

Hi,

I'm trying to do some research on how to salvage my 650GB hard drive. I bought the computer used from ebay and it ran fine for a while but then it crashed a few times. I ran ckdisk and it seemed to fix the problem. Then, the last time I went to the 'dell website to run a diagnostic and sure enough, I guess I must have some bad sectors.

I don't know a lot about computers but I'm hoping I can isolate those bad sectors to their own partition or something like similar so I won't lose the whole thing.

I've already done a back up so I'm not concerned with losing data, I do hope you have some advise for me to save the hard drive and keep as much of it as possible. Your articles have been the most helpful, by the way.

Thanks,

D Baker