Hard drive testing software?

[zrikz]

Does anyone know of any free harddrive testing software to run in Windows 7 64 bit? I believe I have a drive dieing, but I'm not sure which one it is. Can hear one starting to click and im starting to stutter at random times, but can't tell which one it is. On my last one I knew which one because if I opened any folder on that drive it just sat there a minute, problem solved, but that does not seem to be the case here.

the samsung utility wont run for me, and it could also be a Western digital hd that dieing, I'm just not sure.

I'd prefer a utility that does not get rid of data because my backup drive just died and is in RMA =/

 

[Lyquist]

spinrite

 

[MrWizard6600]

spinrite

hah, good to see someone else on these boards is a GRC fan.

Long story short (and I've included the long story at the end of this post), that clicking means your drive is EOL.

You need to figure out which drive it is quick, and then back the data up quick.

All of the contemporary HDD benching applications have hard drive stabillity tests built into them as well, but the one I guess I'd recomend is HDtune (The free version will work for our purposes).

Before you do any drive testing, check to see if the SMART data says anything about the drive. Flip through the drives one by one in HDtune and check the SMART tab too see if there are any unusual numbers. If something warrants your attention, HDtune will highlight it IIRC.

It is the - the drive will put the heads out on the surface and try to obtain a servo lock. Which means it's looking for the special non-data servoing information which is now stored periodically around the track. If you imagine two different signals which are out of phase, like a sine wave signal where from left to right that sine wave diminishes in strength. And then there's another sine wave that's 180 degrees out of phase, meaning that its peaks and valleys are the reverse of the first one. And its strength increases from left to right. So that sort of creates almost sort of a "V" shape. And imagine that the head running down the middle is now receiving both sine waves, the in-phase and the out-of-phase one. Well, as it drifts off track, the signal it gets, which is the composite of both, will start to change. And it can tell by which way the phase changes which direction it's off. And so by moving back to the center and, like, nulling out these two competing sine waves, it's able to stay on track.

Well, that's a good visualization of how servoing works on contemporary drives. And so those little servo bursts, as they're called, occur periodically, and they give the drive-servoing technology, the head-positioning technology, periodic updates on where it is as it moves along the track. Well, the drive's ability to lock onto this servo information is, like, it's the first thing it does when it puts the heads out. If it's unable to acquire that servo information, it'll wait a bit, and trying, moving the heads around, looking for it. And if it can't, it retracts the heads in what's called a "recalibrate operation," and puts them out again. That's the click you hear.

So that clicking is the drive's inability, essentially, to get itself going. So what happens is, when you power the drive up, the platters spin up to speed, which causes the heads to begin flying over the surface. And once the system sees that the platters are up to speed, it then sends the heads out in order to go to the first cylinder and obtain their servo lock. If they can't, it retracts the heads, waits a little bit, and just tries again. There's nothing else it can do. And so what you hear is a clickitic, clickitic, clickitic, clickitic.

And it's not until the drive achieves that servo lock that it then lights up the API, that is, it lights up the interface and says, "I'm online." So essentially the drive is offline. It's not - it isn't paying attention to its interface. There's nothing any software can do. There's nothing anything, anyone can do. Sometimes this is where you put the drive in the refrigerator because that's an old-school approach. But, I mean, you're literally - you don't have many boots left of this - on a drive that's doing that.

 

[Old Hippie]

While reading thru that whole quote I kept wondering....would the freezer trick work on this situation....

Sometimes this is where you put the drive in the refrigerator because that's an old-school approach.

.

The question is, how does cooling the drive effect it's ability to correct this faulty servo information?

Inquiring Old Hippies wanna know.

OP, if the software programs are failing you, I'd be disconnecting the drives one by one 'till I found the clicker.

 

[zrikz]

So I figured out which drive it is and began backing everything up... I got everything minus the last part of my music collection before it just sat there and wouldn't copy anymore, bleh. I might try again later.

On the negative side, this is the HD with my MBR, when this thing finally decides to completely die, is it possible to move the MBR to a new drive so I can boot into windows, my windows installation is on a completely different drive.

 

[Old Hippie]

How to fix MBR in XP or Vista.