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how to test a hard drive

A

Ampsonic

Gawd
Joined
Apr 18, 2004
Messages
830
I've got an old hard drive, I was pulling some data off of, and I thought I heard some clicking, but I'm not totally sure. Is there a good was to definitively test a drive to determine if it is going to fail?

Thanks!
 
Get Seatools, burn it to a CD and boot from it.

Do a short test and if the drive is bad it'll throw up an error. Then run the long test even if no errors were found. The long test takes a few hours but will scan every sector on the drive and will let you attempt to fix any bad sectors found.
 
Which drive do you have? Go to that drive manufacturer's support page and download its diagnostic software.
 
First look at the SMART data with a program like CrystalDiskInfo. This info is a table of statistics the drive keeps about several types of problems that it can have. If CrystalDiskInfo says the drive is not "Good" then it is likely that the drive is going bad.

BTW, my method of testing (and I have 100s of drives) is generally by causing drive activity reads or writes and then looking at the SMART. On linux I either do this by forcing a check of the raid or by using a program called badblocks.
 
Detect software:
1.IBM DFT（Drive Fitness Test)
2.Western Digital,Data LifeGuard Tools
 
I never trust manufacturer tools being that at work I have seen cases where they say a drive is good when it was very bad. WDC and Seagate. For the Seagate case big sections of the drive were unreadable but the drive passed all Seatools tests. Trust me these tools are more about protecting the warranty than your data.
 
SMART data is probably the best thing to look at first, as mentioned above. if you dont know what the numbers mean, post em up here.
 
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