Drive diagnostic utilities compendium

You should certainly try the "zero write" utility. Go to your hard drive mfgrs website and download their diagnostic utility program and run it, inside you will find the "zero write" command.
It only takes a few minutes to run.
 
What does TFT stand for?

I could use a little help with a little hard drive. I'm trying to reformat a tiny 30G Toshiba MK3018GAP, which seems to work just fine, but the formatting is soooo sloooow.... We're talking about 1% every two hours (It'll take a week to finish!).

Any suggestions would be appreciated! Thanks.
 
It Should Have Been Dft Which Stands For Drive Fitness Test. Formatting. If You Have A Windows 98 Startup Disk Insert It And Run Fdisk From A: Prompt. That Should Format More Quickly.
 
Thanks for that Juicy listing of HDD tools! I will be coming back to use that list, from time to time! Well Done!
 
Can anyone advise me on how to tranfer software & files onto a new PC which I will be buying?
The new PC willl not be Connected to the internet as it is only used for music writing.
Can I connect the two together with USB or is it more complex than that?

Hope someone can help.

Tanks Paul
 
To: jbpaulp

You can go and get Aloha Bob's PCRelocator software. it comes with a cable and the software with directions to move all of your stuff and it does it very well. I say it's worth every penny.
That, of course, is only if you need installed programs mo. If you only have saved data files like word, txt., jpg, pdfs and stuff like that, then you could use something like a pocket flash drive, or maybe burn them all to a cd (or DVD if there are more than a cd can hold) and simply drag and drop them into the My Documents folder on the new system. That is where MOST programs save your files.
 
Harddisk undetectable!!

my harddisk is undetectable please help..
plus i hear a ticking sound, is this hd'slife over or can i still fix it?
please help..
i only bought it 2 years ago.
 
First, i would check the warranty on the drive because if you are near the end you want to notify the hard disk mfgr right away, then work on diagnosing.
Maxtors have either a 1 or 3 yr warranty.
Most Seagates have a 5 yr warranty but some have 3 yrs.
I forget about western digital, but i think its 1 yr, but check this out at the hard drive mfgrs website where you can find the info as to if your disk is still under warranty.
If you cant find the place to check it out, email the tech support.

Now to see if the disk is bad or not. Ticking noises are not a good sign, though.
If you have access to another pc, then put your disk in another pc, bearing in mind you may have to change the jumper for either master or slave. If this is your main, c:\, hard disk you will have to jumper it to slave to test in another machine.
As for your hard disk, is this your main c: drive?
Also, when you boot up, go to your bios and see if your bios "sees" the hard disk and let us know. To get into bios you usually press the "delete" button when you are booting up.

There are quite a few utilities around to test your disk but give us the answers to these questions first.
Also, you should really start a new thread, only to make sure others see this and come in and help as im certainly not the best around here, thats for sure, lol.
Also, you havent really told us if your pc boots up or not. I am guessing it doesnt but we arent sure as per what you have posted.
Give us info on that and more info on your pc, age, cpu, motherboard if you can, that sort of info. Is there only one hard drive?
Finally, if you do decide to make your own thread, i wont be notified and i may not see your thread, so you can email or pm me if you want. If not, others will help you out anyway.
You arent done yet, we dont know if your hard disk is kaput or not. We will help you figure that out based on you providing the info needed. And dont forget to give us info on the hard disk itself, the size,mfgr, etc.

thanks
 
boot sector etc repair utility?

I had a "no boot sector found" problem a while back and I came here and somebody had posted a link to a really sweet, lightweight DOS application that you could run directly from windows to test, inspect, repair, recover, and write the MBR to the discs connected to your computer. The utility was awesome. Through some kind of gross lapse of judgement, I deleted the utility, and now I cannot find it anywhere. Does anybody know what I am talking about? Or does anybody know of any similar utility?

I checked out all the items on the list here, but none of them were as simple, elegant and usable as the FREE utility that somebody pointed me to. I was very small, maybe 500Kb, because it had no GUI, just DOS. But the thing that was really great about it, is you could run it straight from Windows, none of these ridiculous "create bootable floppy" programs. Sure you had to be careful about jacking around on your OS drive, but it also gave you access to ANY other hard drives attached to your computer, USB, slaves, etc.
 
Hi Rick,
Thanks for the insight,i fixed on of my Fujitsu notebook HDD,i followed your link and downloaded the Hitachi DFT(drive fitness tool) i created the bootable floppy but when i started the notebook i discovered i could use it,please could you tell, me how i can use this tool to fix my 6.10GB DK23AA-60 Hitachi 2.5" HDD?
thanks
 
Since Seagate has merged with Maxtor, you may want to take down the "PowerMax" link. It no longer exists--only "SeaTools" is still around.

That said, if anyone has any suggestions for diagnosing server SCSI drives in SBS 2003, I could really use one. SeaTools actually says it can work for SCSI drives, but that it can be data destructive. I'd certainly like to avoid that if at all possible! Thanks in advance!
 
yea, there are multiple levels of tests on SCSI drives; JUST AVOID ALL WRITE TESTS :)

you want to test SCSI technology, not the media. To check the media, revert to CHKDSK
 
I have previously used ckdsk, but in a different post, it was suggested that I try a more comprehensive diagnostic tool to test my drives. We are currently trying to narrow down the possible issues that could be causing my problem. So you think that chkdsk is sufficient? If so, I won't worry about any more disk diagnostic tools.
 
get a copy of Everest Home Ed (free) and use the Storage section to access the S.M.A.R.T. feature.

this will show you (if the HD supports it) different kinds of conditions that the
drive is monitoring for itself. Run it ONE/day for a few days, then once/week and
finally once/month. You can then track the 4-5 variables that are not mark
all values allowed for changes, indicating there is a growing problem in that area.
 
Will do. Thanks for the help!

EDIT: Actually, I won't be able to use the Home Ed., because I am needing this for a server. I'm going to look around for a different tool that will still be free before I decide to pay for the Corporate Edition of this.
 
Thanks Rick

Ran into same scenerio with a Dell that has a Seagate SATA drive. Too many errors for chkdsk to fix, said drive has unrecoverable errors. Was not looking forward to re-install due to the fact that this PC has very customized software that takes forever to configure. Seagate utility scanned (about 4 hours) and fixed all errors on the drive! Then was able to run chkdsk to fix all file errors. Easily saved me hours of "in front of PC time" and I looked like a hero to my customer. I am no novice and have run into drive errors on countless occaisions, but never had one I couldn't fix either through recovery console, repair installation or physically removing the drive and scanning / repairing it from another PC. Was never a fan of Manufacturer Drive Utils, but obviously they have come a long way. Thanks Again!
 
what to do if writhen unknown disk inthe place of "C or D"

Hello, what , to do if writhen, unknown disk in the place of "C or D" when you want to reinstal XP? And tried before to give racovery "CHKDSK" and said unracovery problems??????
 
atmikes said:
Hi,

Any of you guys have experience with HDD regenerator?

I had a I/O error on an external USB drive (Maxtor 5000DV - 160GB - 7200 RPM)

I dissasembled the enclosure and installed it in one of my spare system:
a pentium III@665Mhz, 384 MB ram (it's the only one i can afford missing for a week or so)

now i booted to the "HDD regenerator" floppy-disk, and it has run for about 12 Hours an it indicates it's has scanned 20Mb... (and found 41751 sectors with 10069 Bad sectors, 9973 bad sectors recovered)

so a little calculation :

Drive formatted capacity of about 152 GB (1 gigabyte = 1024 megabyte)
152GB = 155648 MB
at 20 Mb / 12 hours or 2.5MB / 12 hours
or 155648MB / 62259.2 hours

it will be about 7.3 years to finish the job, do you think this is normal? :knock:

(and the lifetime of the drive indicates only 5 years...)

see you in a few years...
atmikes


i use this program quite a bit. The scan rate is about 40 Gig/hour. How long it will take to repair the drive is based on the quantity of bad sectors found. If your disk is really badly damged, it can take a very long time to repair. My typical run time for a disk that won't boot is around 8 hours. That is a long time if you are standing over it watching, but the program doesn't require user input until it is finished, so running it over night is the best option.
 
Quick note for "File Scavanger v3.7"

When all else has failed this little package will revover most of the files on your hard disk even when most of the other packages say there;s no hope... You do need a second hard drive though as it won't write corrections to the damaged beast . probably a good idea...

Regards

Tom
 
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