Comprehensive Hard Drive testing tools

[Paperlantern]

I do laptop and PC repair on the side and often need to be able to do a comprehensive hard drive test on a machine with a suspected failing hard drive. Or to test hardware that I have laying around so I know to keep, or throw out. I used to use The Troubleshooter, it had a full non destructive read and write test that tested each and every sector of a drive and reported if it found bad ones or not. Of course the test took hours, sometimes days depending on the drive's size, but it was worth it. The old Troubleshooter program no longer works on newer drives (i think its PATA only).

My question is, does anyone know of any testing suites, or just HDD tests that are generic (meaning they dont come from a specific brand and wont work if the drive isnt that brand), and can do a in depth, comprehensive test on any hard drive?

Typically the machines I work on for people are older, so the troubleshooter has been fine for me up until now. Now even some of the older ones i'm getting from people to work on, have SATA drives in them, and that method no longer works.

 

[piasabird]

There are only a handful of Hard drive brands that people buy. Might look at Seatools from Seagate. The tests are suppose to work on different drives. However writing zero's to the drive will only work on the Seagate drives. They also took over Maxtor and have a MAXTOOL download.

There is a version of Seatools that works without windows.

 

[fralexandr]

if you're using windows, you could try
command prompt chkdsk
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb491051.aspx
although it's probably not as comprehensive as you want

 

[iluvdeal]

Ultimate Boot CD comes with a bunch of different hard drive diagnostic programs from all the different manufacturers.

 

[piasabird]

Might also look at some kind of tool from a Linux Distro. They are good at making boot and formatting tools with both Microsoft and Linux file formats.

 

[piasabird]

Another site to look at for info might be:

http://www.pcmech.com/article/hard-disk-health-checker-for-linux/

It has become a pay/public site now and has scared a lot of people off.

 

[mfenn]

Ultimate Boot CD comes with a bunch of different hard drive diagnostic programs from all the different manufacturers.

:thumbsup::thumbsup: to UBCD.

 

[Paperlantern]

I'm checking out the UBCD now actually. For this one case i suppose i could also look into seatools, it is a seagate drive, but that wont work for future repairs unless its seagate or maxtor. I'll report back on the UBCD.

 

[DaveSimmons]

I'm curious about this too -- I have a half-dozen smaller used IDE and SATA drives I'll put in FS/FT eventually, but would like to run a test on them first.

 

[mfenn]

I'm checking out the UBCD now actually. For this one case i suppose i could also look into seatools, it is a seagate drive, but that wont work for future repairs unless its seagate or maxtor. I'll report back on the UBCD.

That's why UBCD is nice. It includes the manufacturer-specific diagnostics for all the major HDD manufacturers.

 

[Paperdoc]

I understand you're looking for "universal" testing tools not restricted to one manufacturer, but I can't advise on that basis. However, I note someone recommended Seatools, and I have used it and like it for my Seagate HDD's. For WD drives, get their Data Lifegard test suite by free download. In both cases, I prefer the "for DOS" versions. I usually download the .iso images they have and burn them to CD's. These are then bootable testing disks that you can use even with NO functioning HDD in the system - you boot and run from the mini-DOS the CD contains, along with all its test tools operated from a simple menu system.