Drive diagnostic utilities compendium

This is a listing I have put together of every major drive manufacturer and their drive diagnostic utilities. These utilities will allow you to test & diagnose your drive. Some utilities also allow you to "low-level" format (write zeros) or enable/disable certain features on your drive.

Drive Diagnostic Utilities

chkdsk
Built in utiilty for Windows 2000/XP. Start --> Run. Type chkdsk /r for full scan. Can also be run from recovery console. Not recmomended for diagnosing.

Hitachi / IBM - DFT "Drive Fitness Test"
http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm
Works with all manufacturers

Western Digital "Data Lifeguard"
http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp#dlgtools
Works with WD drives only

Maxtor "Powermax"
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=MaxBlast_5&vgnextoid=7add8b9c4a8ff010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD
Works with all manufacturers

Fujitsu "FJDT"
http://www.fel.fujitsu.com/home/drivers.asp?L=en&CID=1
Works with fujitsu models only

Samsung "hutil"
http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/utilities/hutil.htm
Compatability unknown...

Seagate "Seatools"
http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools
Works with Seagate drives only

Toshiba - N/A
There are no tools available for Toshiba, but you may be able to use IBM or Maxtor's drive tools as well as other third party programs


Other Useful Drive Utilities

HDD Regenerator - Repair bad sectors
Repairs most bad sectors by remagnetizing the disk surface without losing your data. Works independantly of the file system, making it compatible with all PCs, operating systems and hard drives...
http://www.dposoft.net/

Active@Partition Recovery
Recovers most deleted, lost or formatted partitions.
http://www.partition-recovery.com/

Partition Magic
Fast and easy partitioning, Supports all Windows and most Linux file systems. Great for ignoring bad sectors and for advanced partitioning schemes.
www.partitionmagic.com

Ranish
GPL/Freeware partitioning program for use with Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and more. Not much on eye candy, but it works. :).
www.ranish.com

gParted
GPL/Freeware partitioning program for use with Windows and Linux. Nice, intuitive interface and comes available as a bootable CD image..
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

Acronis Partition Expert
Easy to use interface. Supports Windows and Linux partitions.
http://acronis.com/products/partitionexpert/


Drive Backup Tools

Symantec Norton Ghost
Ghost 8.0 or less runs under DOS, but extremely reliable. Ghost 9.0 and 10 requires Windows 2000 or XP. 9.0 & 10 are Windows-centric. Ghost 9+ supports full "hot imaging" of system partitions while in Windows, but not incremental imaging.
http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/

Acronis True Image
Supports Windows and Linux file systems. Allows "hot imaging" of system partitions while in Windows, supporting full and incremental (fast) backups. TI 10 has been rock solid for me -- Recommended.
http://acronis.com/products/trueimage/


Drive Secure Erase Utilities

Darik's Boot and Nuke
Securley erases all data on your harddrives, beyond the point of possible recovery. Use with care! Tip: remove harddrives you will not be erasing from the computer.
http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Thanks for that useful post Rick. Should come in handy for future reference.

Great list Rick. People are always either looking for one of those, or end up needing one while they are trying to sort out a problem.

Thought I'd add this one to the list.
HDD Regenerator is shareware and costs ~$40 but it can sometimes repair a disk without wiping the data. I thought it worth mentioning since there was some recent discussion about it in the IRC channel.

HDD Regenerator
http://www.pcpowertools.netfirms.com/

Just to say BIG THANKS and GREAT JOB to Rick!
I was lost with booting problems and almost ready to format the HD, but i could save my data thanks to the Drive fitness utility, which i found in his post.
Keep going man! :grinthumb

I added the "Drive Secure Erase Utilities" section and the program "Darik's Boot and Nuke"

:knock:
I recently booted WinXP to find it complaining that the last disk in my RAID 0 had failed. The array held many folders, each with 9000 148kb bitmap files in it.
When I mounted the array in Linux there were no complaints and I managed to retrieve 1400 of the bitmaps from one of the folders (that I did not have backed up). I never thought that this would work since I believed that individual files were split among the four hard drives.
Anyway, I left the system off for a while to cool down and managed to extract all 9000 files! Once my data was safe I tried WinXP again but it still complained about the last disk and stopped me from any access to the array.
I am using an Adaptec 1200A RAID controller.

I have noticed that Norton and Mcaffee Programs can LOCK UP the Disk Utilities Programs, so that no other Disk Utilities can perform tasks on the Hard Drive Correctly.
Specifically the thing that Annoys me the Most is the inability for Windows Defragmenter to Defrag the Hard Drive.
Even After I have Completely Closed all Programs including all Anti-Virus Programs, Un Plugged From the Internet, to Cut off any behind the scenes Traffic, Defrag is STILL Not Running right.
The Defrag Program will start, but it will not Defrag past 1%. It goes to 1% then Loops back and Starts over, again and again and again without making any progress at all.

I'm Stumped. I don't know what to do about this aside from Formatting the Harddrive and Starting over. Any one have any Suggestions?

Thanks,
Mark*

Thanks for taking the time to put this toegether
Very helpful :unch:

Cheers man

Here's another one to add to the list, perhaps unique in that a real person wants to help solve your problem.

Last Sunday I really messed up my drive on the new system by failing to reboot between app installs (duh). After installing Vegas, DVDA, Sound Forge, Norton Systemworks, and finally GoBack, I re booted, creating a disaster.

I can't say enough good about Bob Greene and his creation, BootMaster (bootmaster.filerecovery.biz). After downloading the free demo, you run it and create a report. Then you send it into Bob, who makes a recommendation both regarding the solution and whether or not BootMaster will help solve the problem. It turned out in my case the demo alone was enough to get the job done (changing the partition from GoBack to NTFS). Amazing--real live help, basically for free.

hope you never need it, but if so, check it out.

Scott

I have noticed that Norton and Mcaffee Programs can LOCK UP the Disk Utilities Programs, so that no other Disk Utilities can perform tasks on the Hard Drive Correctly.
Specifically the thing that Annoys me the Most is the inability for Windows Defragmenter to Defrag the Hard Drive.
Even After I have Completely Closed all Programs including all Anti-Virus Programs, Un Plugged From the Internet, to Cut off any behind the scenes Traffic, Defrag is STILL Not Running right.
The Defrag Program will start, but it will not Defrag past 1%. It goes to 1% then Loops back and Starts over, again and again and again without making any progress at all.

I'm Stumped. I don't know what to do about this aside from Formatting the Harddrive and Starting over. Any one have any Suggestions?

Thanks,
Mark*
To: Webninja

Just some suggestions although likely not very strong ones (sorry). I think the windows defrag requires 15% of the drive to be free before it can run properly, maybe you can reboot into dos and run from there? or delete enough stuff to give you the 15% you need to run the defrag in Windows. Are you able to run the Disk Cleanup utility? And is your system tray resources closed/temporarily shut down. One last suggestion, maybe uninstall the antivirus suite/reboot and try again if you are able to reactivate your antivirus software again.

I have a maxtor 5000LE 80gb external drive and I have been getting an I/O disk error, is there a diagnostic program for external drives?

Looks like I am not able to test my hard drive here at home...

I have a Maxtor Diamondmax 10 hard drive, and Powermax will not work for me since I have an nforce4 chipset.

PowerMax v 4.21 will not detect ATA or SATA hard disks connected to embedded or add in RAID controllers, NVIDIA Force 3, Force 4, VIA KT 600 and KT800 chipsets.

The Defrag Program will start, but it will not Defrag past 1%. It goes to 1% then Loops back and Starts over, again and again and again without making any progress at all.

Mark*

boot into SAFE MODE and run defrag again. Some task is writing a log file and
this disrupts the program to start over, and over, and over.

Are there any disk utilities for a Maxtor SATA drive?

MaxBlast 3 from the Maxtor site.

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

What about for Dell? :knock:

defrag does not work well on hard drives bigger than 137gb

Hey guys,
I have been asked to run CHKDSK now n then by windows. Everytime I run it I get the message CHKDSK-->File record segment ***** is unreadable eight times when performing the 1st cycle. I get it 8times where the segments are in 2 blocks of 4 each(like 3070 3071 3072 3073 and 4467 4468 4469 4470). I know that my HDD has been damaged. Windows is running fine except ones in while it says cannot access so n so file and check for HDD space. I want to know is there anything I can do so that windows knows I have bad scetors at so n so location and not access that area for storage from now on. Have ran "CHKDSK /R" which recovers the bad areas but not much help. It terminated at 75% and displayed one or more areas unrecoverable.
thanks,
SID.

if you have bad sectors on the hard disk, you'll need to low-level format it.

I would keep a lookout on the hard disk. Developing bad sectors are a sign of failure.

Umm....how do I low level format it? Is it changing the NTFS file system to FAT32?? I recently installed my OS because it was unstable whne these bad sectors were found.

Umm....how do I low level format it? Is it changing the NTFS file system to FAT32?? I recently installed my OS because it was unstable whne these bad sectors were found.

No, it is much more thorough than formatting through Windows. It basically writes "0" to every user-accessible sector of the drive.

This type of formatting is often not enough to repair bad sectors, but it can hide them... and as long as no new ones pop up, you'll be okay.

To repair bad sectors, you may also want to try HDD Regenerator (listed in the first part of this thread). It's not free though and isn't guaranteed to work (although it really does a great job with most problems I've encountered).

I would suggest buying a new drive instead. Developing new bad sectors is a sign of failure and you're in for a major headache later on. 80GB drives are going for around $50. 200GB drives are only $100. And with rebate specials etc... the price goes even lower. There really aren't any good excuses to keep your drive unless your computer is really, really old or you are entirely unable to spend any money at all.

The type of low-level formatting that Rick and possibly others has described is very important. What you have to do is get the make and perhaps even the model of your hard drive, with that info you go to your hard drive mfgrs website and download the diagnostic program. This prog ends up on a floppy and works in dos. You can use a win98 boot disk (even If you have win xp installed) as it works from dos. You enter dos using the win98 boot disk or any other boot disk you want to use, then put the diagnostic floppy in the floppy drive. The command differs a bit but its usually something like "write zeroes to hard drive". Just click on it and it does the rest.
This is a very useful program as it returns the drive to factory settings. Mainly it gives you a fresh master boot record (mbr). This program is good to use when you have any problems with your hard drive, or when you get an error message something like " disk not found", any time you cant access your hard drive. Its also good to use this program when you are trying to install win xp and it wont install. I'd say 60% of the time it will fix a win xp install and if not then you know its not the hard drive thats bad!.
So its a great program, i use it all the time. In fact, i run the "write zeros to hard drive before all my win xp installs, saves time in the end.
Also, the "write zeros to hard drive" prog eliminates all viruses, malware, trojans, etc, etc, as a lot of them, like trojans, are in the master boot record and cant be deleted any other way. Again, a great little program.
After running this prog then you run scandisk (win98) or chkdsk (win xp).
Scandisk and chkdsk will mark and bad sectors off and they will not be accessed by win98 or win xp or any other os so they will not show up again as bad sectors. If you have done this and get more bad sectors right away that is a hint the drive is failing and shouldnt be used any more! Also, if you have smartdrive enabled in your bios it should tell you the drive is going bad.
Just so you know, when you use "write zeroes to hard drive" you do lose all your data. So if there is data on your drive and you want it and if you can access the drive then take the data off that drive and put it on a cd,dvd, another drive, etc.
Also note that after running this program you still have to format the hard drive, NTFS or FAT32 as you need.

would i need to use 1 of these hd diagnostic tools for my hd wit the current problems i have been having??....... i recently decided to format the drive (samsung hd120ij) due to wantin to clear off everythin!! during the format (quick) it freezes at 20% and when i try a slow format it freezes at 1% then reports back that the drive may be damaged!!! ive only had it for about 4 months so its not like its old and gone senile yet!!

if anyone can help me i would most appreciate it.

also.....
the page explaining about the hutil program says you need to copy it to a floppy diskette i have no floppy drive in my comp, so im thinkin it will work okay burnt to cd-r if anyone thinks it wont be okay could you plz let me know b4 i do something stupid!!!!! thank you

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.

i just ran ibm tft version 7.0 and it diagnosed my toshiba laptop hard drive successfully;.

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

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.

Drive Utilities

Cute Partition Manager
Freeware partitioning program for use with Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and more...
www.cutepm.com

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

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.

I am after a vaio one, does this thread have it?. My laptop has an error of , 'operating system error''

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.

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!

thx, for the list

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??????

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

Thanks Rick! I hope you could help us if ever I have some questions. God bless.

Rick
Very informative & thanks...

Later...