how to test a hard drive

[upup]

My brothers computers hard drive gives him worries.
computer starts by luck.
He replace the data cable, worked well, but now start doing same thing. How can he test it. I think he do win 7 now.

 

[Dimpie (JIGSAW)]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Tach

 

[Nuro]

Get speedfan. It will report S.M.A.R.T data for the drive, and tell if if it has failed, or is about to.

EDIT: http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

 

[backstreetboy]

www.hddscan.com

 

[Nephew_]

Pick one that suits you www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-hd-health-monitoring-and-diagnostic-programs.htm

 

[HavocXphere]

Spinrite....its not free though.

 

[ponder]

The mention of spinrite makes me cringe.

 

[HavocXphere]

The mention of spinrite makes me cringe.

Any specific reason why?

 

[ponder]

Any specific reason why?

It's silicone snake oil imho. It could potentially kill a dying drive or make it worse. The first thing you would want to do is get as most data off the drive as possible by imaging it (what you can anyway) there are some expensive hardware out there that can do this for you or some software like gnu ddrescue for example. Once you have as much data off as possible you can start stuffing around with it. Even the above is not always the best option and something like a head swap would be needed before you proceed.

See http://wiki.lunarsoft.net/wiki/Data_Recovery#Software_to_avoid


.

 

[MickZA]

Any specific reason why?

It had its uses back in the days of 5.25" 20MB HDDs (showing my age here) when you could also perform a degree of data recovery by loosening or tightening the mounting screws in various combinations but I can't recall any real successes with it since the advent of 3.5" HDDs and capacities in excess of 2GB - YMMV

 

[HavocXphere]

It's silicone snake oil imho. It could potentially kill a dying drive or make it worse.

I see. Yeah I agree with the snake oil part to some extent. They emphasize the angle where it miraculously fixes the hdd, which I don't quite buy.

I find it useful for confirming suspicions that a drive is turning flakey though. I've had drives where I'm convinced something is wrong: SMART, chkdisk and the seagate tool all checked out yet spinrite flags a couple of areas.

If one knows the drive is bad then yeah you def don't want spinrite hammering it for 48hrs straight.

Your imagining comment intrigues me though. Once you've got the image, how do you mount it to run run recovery software over it (say GetDataBack) assuming NTFS?

 

[ponder]

Your imagining comment intrigues me though. Once you've got the image, how do you mount it to run run recovery software over it (say GetDataBack) assuming NTFS?

Sorry, no idea how to do it in windows. I use mostly linux utilities.

 

[HavocXphere]

Sorry, no idea how to do it in windows. I use mostly linux utilities.

OS doesn't matter to me for recovery. More interested in the NTFS part. *All* of the disk I encounter are NTFS formatted.

I think I found an answer googling it. It seems that virtual box can load dd images as a drive. From there one can presumably then run Win tools against it. Def gonna try this next time some drive goes belly up. Thx wasn't aware of ddrescue.

 

[ponder]

OS doesn't matter to me for recovery. More interested in the NTFS part. *All* of the disk I encounter are NTFS formatted.

I think I found an answer googling it. It seems that virtual box can load dd images as a drive. From there one can presumably then run Win tools against it. Def gonna try this next time some drive goes belly up. Thx wasn't aware of ddrescue.

You can mount NTFS images in Linux with no issues. Linux supports a schiteload of filesystems which is great and utilities to work on them. Never even tried it with VB.