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.js...00dd04090aRCRD
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/Hard...ties/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!

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

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.

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.