Any way to check a HD to see if it's good?

[toronado97]

I had to stop using my 160 GB HD because I couldn't get Windows to install on it w/o bluescreening constantly, so I'm assuming the drive is in fact junk, but is there any way I can find out for sure? Any test I can run, software I can DL to go over it, etc that will tell me for sure so I dont junk it if I don't have to?

 

[QuixoticOne]

Typically the manufacturer (seagate, western digital, maxtor, ....) of the drive will have some free utilities on their web site to do diagnostics.
Here's an older list of some of those tools / links, though I'm sure some have since changed and may need to be discovered directly from the manufacturer's site.
http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287
http://www.duxcw.com/faq/hd/diag.htm

There are 3rd party tools also
http://lifehacker.com/399102/h...hard-drive-diagnostics
http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/...d-disks-with-hdd-scan/
http://hddscan.com/

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/...rade/tp/tophddiag2.htm


I have no personal suggestion as to which ones are good / bad other than that the HDD manufacturer's tools can usually be expected to be safely assumed to more or less work as described.

Note well that most often apparent problems with the hard disc are NOT the fault of the drive, but are the fault of the PC BIOS problems, Operating system problems, ESPECIALLY Operating system disk driver / driver settings problems, cable related problems, et. al. Many times the cables will be of bad quality or installation. Many times the DMA modes on IDE type drives are not quite correctly functional in a given drive / driver / controller / BIOS combination. Even if you run proper diagnostics tools booting straight from DOS or a diagnostic disc without using the PC's main OS at all, incorrect BIOS settings / BIOS bugs can still cause problems in some cases. If you run any tool that runs under the PC's main OS (e.g. MS Windows) you will still be at the mercy of the OS's disk / chipset drivers working well, and often times they DO NOT. So update the system BIOS, the OS chipset / controller / disk drivers, install the latest OS service pack / support fixes, check for malware / buggy programs, et. al. before assuming a drive is bad.

 

[Nothinman]

Most of those utilities just run SMART self-tests which aren't 100% reliable either. What you probably want is something like the badblocks on Linux, it writes certain patterns to the disk and then reads the blocks back to see if the data made it to the disk properly.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Some of the tools have limited surface scan capability, either read-only, erase / format test, read / write / verify, et. al.

http://hddscan.com/
does a few kinds of read only tests as well as having an erase test capability.

Admittedly one could want some more severe & comprehensive looped read / write / verify & pattern testing / surface scan support. Some of the other tools give you more of that.

If it can run for 48 hours of read/write surface scan testing of the whole drive without developing serious numbers of SMART errors / new (or preexisting) bad sectors then I'd say it is fine. Even if it doesn't work, though, it could still be the cable or BIOS (or drivers in use assuming you're not using a DOS/CD/floppy booting based test).

 

[QuixoticOne]

These free bootable CDs also have some diagnostic tools included:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/index.html
http://www.sysresccd.org/System-tools

 

[toronado97]

Thanks for all the information Quixotic. The drive was working perfectly until I reformatted my drives. Fiance got a keylogger on her computer and I went the safe way and wiped mine as well just in case, and ever since I reformatted the drive simply won't work. Won't install Windows XP to it, keeps giving write errors on every other file, then blue screens during the actual installation process. My 250 GB works just fine and is what my system is currently using because of the issues I had with the other one. 160 GB Maxtor, SATA. I guess the cable could be bad but I don't have any spares to check it with, everything else I have is ATA. Bleh.