Hard drive utilities?

[TheCommander]

Can someone recommend some good free hard drive utility software- something that would scan for bad sectors, check the drive, etc....

[gporche]

maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital all have their own tools.Depending on your brand, just go to their web site and you can dowload the tools free.

[Joe Average]

The above suggestion is accurate; most but not all manufacturers have a diagnostic tool for their hard drives. Most of those utilities don't actually do repairs - they typically are used to diagnose an actual problem so you can RMA the hardware back to the manufacturer and give the disposition code (the results of the diagnostic) as proof that something is defective with the hardware, hence the return.

HDTune has a S.M.A.R.T. status checker and can do a surface scan of a drive and report on bad sectors, etc. A proper full format can sometimes remap bad sectors so they're not used anymore, but I can't imagine trying to do a full normal format on a 500, 750, or heaven forbid a 1TB hard drive - that could take upwards of 20+ hours or even longer to complete.

And don't trust S.M.A.R.T. status either: I just worked on a Dell Latitude laptop earlier today that had 4 bad sectors and the S.M.A.R.T. status looked clear across the board. The bad sectors were near the beginning of the drive and prevented the machine from booting properly even after I restored the MBR and the boot.ini file using the Recovery Console in XP Pro for the client. It's a Seagate SATA laptop drive, and the SeaTools (Seagate's drive diagnostic software) wouldn't even finish and choked on the error; it told me to contact Seagate for a replacement, but luckily I don't give up that easily. I had some tools in my tech toolkit that actually "freshened up" the sectors in question back to a usable state without issues - SpinRite comes to the rescue once more!

HOWEVER...

Even though the machine is now operating correctly, it was still appropriate to tell the client of the issues, that the hard drive did have some bad sectors and because of that there's a future possibility of the drive failing - more so now because it was "repaired" - and that he should get a replacement or larger capacity drive very soon. That's just the responsible thing to do. Once a drive shows an error, even if you correct the problem temporarily as this "fix" was intended to do, it's still the right course of action to notify the client/owner of the issue and make the suggestion to get a new drive or replacement ASAP.

Once a hard drive shows an error - even just 1 sector goes bad - that means the drive could fail right when you (or the client/owner) least expects it. Hard drives aren't like bones - once broken they get "fixed" and are actually stronger/better afterwards, same with muscle growth. You damage a muscle (work it and damage it by exercise or stressing it) and it heals by growing back stronger the second time around.

If only hard drives were "self-healing" like that, but they aren't. Once they show signs of a defect, get the data backed up and replace it with a 100% working part, period.

[Elijah]

Can someone recommend some good free hard drive utility software- something that would scan for bad sectors, check the drive, etc....

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

Watch these videos, they sold me (well, not yet but when I have the cash) --> http://www.grc.com/sr/themovie.htm

I just had a hard drive with a bunch of bad sectors etc. This software reads all file systems and if used properly can accurately detect when a hard drive is about to fail. The videos show it.

Edit - Not free but you should know about it.