Checking Hard Drive Integrity

[SanDiegoKid]

Who knows a good program to check a hard drive's integrity?

I think one of mine is going down the poop hole, but I'm not sure.

Delayed write failures, cyclical redundancies; that sort of thing.

[mcovey]

what kind of hd I have an excelstor and mine sucksed so they send me a diagnostic iso image that I ended up never using because it was using pio instead of udma which was the problem.

[shawners]

I used hard drive generator.. It works on all file formats and leave them intact and recover the sectors and repairs.. It's along process and can help.

[nukehella]

What is hard drive generator?I couldn't find anything on it.

[shawners]

Pm me your email address and ill send you the program .. Make sure you have a flopy disk so you can boot up on the disk and select which hard drive to check and repair.. I had over 14000 bad sectors on my maxtor 30 gig hard drive.. works beautiful now =)
Its called Hard Drive Regenerator.

[cpugeniusmv]

any program that can display SMART information...speedfan does this.

[infringer]

Bad sectors cannot be fixed they can only be remapped it is not possible to undo the physical damage caused... So if your full of bad sectors your screwed.

Keep in mind the avg HDD half life they figure is about 5 years after 5 years its very critical that you backup any data and consider investing in more storage as it loses half of its magnetic pull so your data is more likely to be inconsistent and fragmented.

-infringer-

[uselesscrap]

Spinrite is a great program for failing HD and recovery or analysis, but it's not exactly free...*cough*

read more: http://grc.com/sr/faq.htm

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

[shawners]

It says it can and done it.. It would take 30 seconds to access the damage drive and scans each folder empty which was deleted by the hard drive when it failed.. What causes bad sectors, it started deleteing a few files, backed everything i could.. and continue to decentegrate all the other files on there.. and started to use it just to see what it does.. it accessed the whole drive and seemed to fix it.
http://www.computerbroker.com/hddregenerator.htm
http://www.tomdownload.com/utilities/file_disk_management/hdd_regenerator.htm
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,24656,00.asp
http://discovervalue.com/hard_drive_regenerator
http://www.pcnet-online.com/content/utilities/199904.htm
http://www.topdownloads.net/software/view.php?id=8307

[SanDiegoKid]

Thanks, Shawners. Hard Drive Rgenerator is currently on the Guest PC, scanning the drive in question.

I use the Guest PC for downloading and stuff that gets in the way of playing sweet games on my main box. I downloaded a DVD from a.b.dvdr and was only able to access half of the files due to a cyclical redundancy error.

Crap.

[ducttapeBigSexy]

idk if anyone out there is still looking for a program for reading SMART information, but SMARTmon tools (http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/) is a cross platform program for reading SMART information. It's command line driven, but it works pretty nice - I've personally use the Windows version, although it's also avaliable for Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Darwin.

SMARTmon can also be set to run every few minutes in the background to test your hard drive for any problems (under Linux it can be run as a service, and there's a service like program for it in Windows).

[bLOODbAT]

I found this guide to be helpful:

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1583&page=2

Recently had to return a WD1200 120GB drive due to the "Raw Read Error Rate" worst value falling below its threshold value. (Other symptons were lost data, bad blocks, and drive set in PIO mode)

The best thing to do seems to be to check the SMART data - if any worst value is below its threshold, then assume the drive is bad and have it replaced.

If all SMART values are ok, check cabling. If its an ATA-IDE drive, ensure you are using a 80 wire IDE ribbon cable - not the rounded type as these can sometimes cause crosstalk between the wires in the cable. Ensure you are not using a 40 wire cable (note that both have the same connectors but the 80 wire cable has the extra ground wires which prevent crosstalk between each data wire. I say not to use a rounded cable because in a rounded cable, you have all the wires bunched up - therefore removing the benefit of the extra ground wires seperating the data wires from each other.)
Also ensure that the cable does not touch any other data cables.

If its a SATA drive, ensure there are no 'loops' of the cable or touching of other cables as this is known to cause problems.

[Afn]

Who knows a good program to check a hard drive's integrity?

I think one of mine is going down the poop hole, but I'm not sure.

Delayed write failures, cyclical redundancies; that sort of thing.After about 4 to 5 years my hardrives make alot of noise. When that happens I buy a larger hard drive and use the segate hard drive utility to clone the old drive onto the new. This solves the clunking and keeps the "old" hardrive boot files and programs on the new hard drive, with out the clunking noise(s).

[SanDiegoKid]

HDD Regen's been going for almost six hours now.

"596 Bad Sectors Found"
"596 Bad Sectors Recovered"

It's got about fifteen more GB to scan too.

[SanDiegoKid]

Ohh crap.

"939 bad sectors found, 839 bad sectors recovered."

I guess that means it's toast.

I have two hard drives in my main box, but I dunno if I wanna spare one for the guest PC.

[shawners]

Yeah, it needs replacing =(

[SanDiegoKid]

Infringer, you said something about remapping bad sectors.... ?

Care to expand on that? If I lose 15 GB on cpacity on this thing it's no big deal, but I don't want to download another 4GB DVD image and have half of the .RARs corrupted.

I could go buy another hard drive, but the guest PC is a 1GHz Athlon with a GeForce4. So, to me, it's pretty much a calculator. Not worth money I could just as well spend on women, wine, candy bars, comic books, gumball machine toys, cheap aviator sunglasses, sea monkeys, a foreigner belt, and some 'lil turkey muffins.

[infringer]

Well your harddrive can only remap so many bad sectors to tell the truth I believe there is a built in tolerance on the hdd controller which allows it to remap bad sectors up to a certain amount... I dunno about remapping them yourself but there may be some way to do it though I dont recall a way just for kicks try formatting a 10-13GB partition on the drive and leaving the remaining 2-5GB's open.... I have heard of a few people having success doing this though I have yet to test it for myself.

Your best bet is to set up an ebay account and purchase a small 15 gigger or 20 gigger off there though you can give it a shot I recall of one guy who claimed he had a 40gig hard drive partitioned it to 20gigs and ran it for a couple years after his bad sector issues maybe just a fluke of luck... I dunno give it a try if all you need is 4 gigs...

-infringer-