Hard Drive Analysis software

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MrAgmoore

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jun 5, 2008
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Recommend software that can be run off a 1.44 MB floppy, independant of an OS ( before an OS has been loaded ).

I need to format, check the integrity of the hard drive and partition the drive.

I'm trying to differentiate between motherboard bios settings freezing my OS ( XP Pro 32 bit ) both during install and after or WD Raptor 300gb having errors.

Motherboard is Gigabyte P55A-UD3P ( flashed from version F5 to F10 ). Google shows that this series and higher has freezing errors, with advice varying from disabling Intel's temperature monitoring or power saving to disabling legacy USB devices ( on boot ). I've disabled everything that I can: reducing the i7-860 to 1 core with no hyperthreading, to install Win XP, with no success. It initially installed OK with bios F5 but froze after installing motherboard drivers.

OS freezes caused me to reboot the computer, while the hard drive was being accessed and now CHKDSK shows errors ( 1 meg difference between total disk space and available on 1 of 2 partitions.

Bios F10 freezes during Win XP install.

Windows Memory Diagnostic says that the first 4 gb of RAM is fine ( I have 8 GB installed ).

Thanks.
 
The best software of all will be the actual diagnostic software provided by the manufacturer of that drive. If you happen to have some funky brand that doesn't provide such a tool, use the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test which is not "locked" into it's own brand of drives (Hitachi and IBM) and can be used to thoroughly test any and all other brands as well.

MHDD would be the next suggestion for any and all drives, not very intuitive but it'll run a fairly intense scan (press F4, then Control+Enter and leave it alone) and you can spot errors as they appear - more often than not they're not actually errors but sectors on a real hard drive that require a bit more *uNF* to read, and the access time will spike because of it. Actual bad sectors or problems will come us a big white X.

Run the Quick diagnostic, and regardless of it passing or failing, then run the Advanced one right after it, to completion. At the end you'll either get a disposition code of 000000 (no errors detected at all), or it'll tell you what the hell is wrong if something actually is.

That's about it. And what's with testing just 4GB of your 8GB?
 
I'll try the WD diagnostic on a floppy. A couple of days ago, I tried the Windows version of the WD diagnostic in "quickcheck mode" on the new Raptor drive and the only data that it gives is a big green tick ( or I guess a big red X ). It took an hour to do "extensive scan" on an external WD 120 GB Caviar drive ( that I use for archival backup ) so I was hoping for more information, for 1 hour per 100 gig scan ( ie. 3 hours of downtime to scan the WD drive ).

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=612&sid=2&lang=en


The "error code list" is extensive so I'll try the 3 hour scan, via floppy:

http://support.wdc.com/techinfo/general/errorcodes.asp?lang=en#v10


Free memory scanners, including Microsoft Windows Memory Diagnostic only tests 4GB of RAM ( because all you'll ever need is 640 kb of RAM, yknow? ).

I figured I could get away with the 4gb, since Win XP 32 bit can only address up to that much?

Also, yesterday, I tried installing Win 7, 64 bit and I got a BSOD stop error, with a recommendation to do a chkdsk /F

I'm building a new system. The MHDD looks interesting.
 
memtest86+ = the best software based RAM diagnostic software there is. The Windows one might be fail for > 4GB but not memtest86+, I've used it on machines with 32GB and it handles the amount with aplomb.

Windows XP 32 bit will only "see" 3.25GB of it - there's lot of threads around here about that stuff, including a sticky with extensive info as well. Using some software like RamDisk Plus from SuperSpeed, you can actually make use of RAM past the 3.25GB point even with 32 bit versions of Windows... ;)

And doing extensive diagnostic scans on hard drives is a long slow arduous process anyway, there's no magic formula that just scans the drive in a few seconds, just not possible. Most diagnostic software reads each sector several times even though to our eyes the data represented on the screen looks like it's moving along at break-neck paces. It's reading the sectors 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, sometimes 16x or more over and over with each pass of the platter under the heads and comparing the data with all previous passes - one problem with the error correction and that's noted.

So, even that 10K VelociRaptor will take time to get it done right. MHDD is a very nice tool, been using it for years, and it's got some rather extensive capabilities that are buried in it including the ability to 'resurrect' previously dead/bad sectors. One point to remember here is that one bad sector doesn't necessarily ruin a drive considering there's billions upon billions of them on most high cap drives nowadays - but it's definitely something to take note of and then do regular scans for.

S.M.A.R.T. status is NOT an actual indicator of drive health as most people believe, it's just meant to look at situations and patterns that could lead to failure. That's it...

The manufacturer's diagnostic is still the only true way to get the real deal on a given drive; if you end up with a disposition code that shows a problem, get the drive replaced under warranty service if possible.

I've got drives with 100+ bad sectors on them still in use for years now, and I've got some that fail S.M.A.R.T. almost instantly that are still in use. Sometimes you do what you have to when you can't afford new ones on a regular basis. ;)
 
S.M.A.R.T. status is NOT an actual indicator of drive health as most people believe, it's just meant to look at situations and patterns that could lead to failure. That's it...
Click to expand...

I have never seen smart say a disk was bad (even on disks where 1/3 of the drive was unreadable) and I am taking about in a work environment where I replace 1 to 5% of the drives annually because of failure. Smart sometimes does help predict failure however. I mean when the reallocated sector count grows each day. I watch a drive.
 
It's been my experience that SMART is very unreliable.

I'm pretty sure it should be renamed "D.U.M.B.".
 
The low level diagnostic, using Western Digital's software gave me the model number, serial number, firmware version and CHS ( the windows version only gave model and serial numbers ). The "quick test" ( which took a couple of minutes ) gave error code 0000 ( no errors ). The extended test ( which only took about 50 minutes, surprisingly ) gave error code 0000 ( no errors ).

I started testing the RAM 2 sticks at a time but Windows Memory Diagnostic said that it could only test up to 4 Gigs. I looked on the packet and each stick is 2048 MB so I tested each stick:

RAM serial # || Result

xxxxxxxx123|| Pass
xxxxxxxx124|| Pass
xxxxxxxx133|| Pass
xxxxxxxx134|| FAIL

Stick 134 failed on LRAND / WMATS+ consistantly. I turned off my computer and tested it twice, just to make sure.

It's good to know that Memtest86+ gets a thumbs up ( I wasn't sure whether to use it at the time ). I'll RMA the RAM and try Memtest86+ out on the new RAM ( it will save me dicking around with RAM ).

I'd like to say that the faulty RAM solved all of the problems but while figuring out the quirks of my new motherboard / bios / system in general, I noticed that after installing Win XP Pro 32, I have to install motherboard drivers from the CD that I got with the board. I'm kind of used to getting the internet, firewall and surfing for porn going ( these things are important ) but if I do that then within a couple of reboots, my computer has catastrophic hangs - it won't autorun CDs, opening control panel and closing it crashes control panel, running IE 6 displays the sands of time hourglass...

I figured out that installing the drivers that came with the motherboard ( probably the intel chipset drivers ) stabilize the system. From there, I downloaded NVIDIA's latest driver and Auzentech's latest sound card driver. Everything is hunky dorey but then I download Zonelabs latest Extreme Internet Security, try and update it and the system hang seems to hang. I noticed the hard drive light flickering perodically and it's like the system is running in slow motion... catastrophic hangs.

i-860 shows core temperatures ranging from 39-49 Celcius in bios. I'll re-paste the HSF at some point but if I have to RMA the motherboard, it can wait.

I just finished creating a customized version of Win XP, with registry tweaks and the latest version of Opera web browser using Nlite:

http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html

I'll have to go and figure out if ZoneAlarm Extreme Security is causing the catastrophic system hangs.
 
Yeah so a new Zonelabs product called Extreme Security is causing problems ( 6 page thread ):

http://forum.zonealarm.com/showthread.php?p=280064

I talked with a representative in live chat and got a refund in 30 seconds.

I'm using the marginally more basic "Internet Security" suite ( I've been using Zonelabs paid firewall since 2007 since it's a good product. )


I'm going to download Prime95 and do an overnight stress test.
 
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