Question for anyone experienced running CheckDisk

[Ken90630]

All the times I've run CheckDisk on a hard drive (maybe ~10 times), nothing unusual or 'unrepairable' has happened. I always get a brief message at the end saying, "the volume is clean."

For you guys/gals who've run CheckDisk a lot, I'm curious: Have you ever run it, or tried to reformat a HD, and run into a sitch where bad sectors were found and weren't repairable? What happens? Do you get a message during the CheckDisk process, or after it's complete? And if so, what does it say?

Also, the "volume is clean" message is so brief you have to be sitting right there and watching for it to even catch it. Is there any way to access a log or report of CheckDisks that have been run on a particular machine, like to print it out or at least look at it again?

 

[n7]

It will tell you if it was not successful.

I run it on bad or dying HDDs all the time at werk...it can definitely fix things!

That said, there's a good chance your HDD is bad if CHKDSK is repairing things...

That's when you run the manufacturers' diagnostic.

 

[Nothinman]

Have you ever run it, or tried to reformat a HD, and run into a sitch where bad sectors were found and weren't repairable? What happens?

Chkdsk will mark bad sectors in the filesystem when it encounters them, however if you get to the point where bad sectors are exposed to the system then the drive has run out of it's internal spare sectors so it has no choice but to tell the OS about that. If that happens you should start looking to replace the drive.

 

[RebateMonger]

Chkdsk results can also be found in the Application Event Log in Windows.

 

[Ken90630]

Thanks, guys. :beer:

Originally posted by: n7
That said, there's a good chance your HDD is bad if CHKDSK is repairing things...

That's when you run the manufacturers' diagnostic.

I assume you're referring to S.M.A.R.T.? I've never actually used that yet -- how do you run it? From the BIOS?

Also, from what I can see, Western Digital's Data Lifeguard and Seagate's Sea Tools don't appear to do anything more than CheckDisk does. Am I correct, or missing something?

 

[n7]

No, i don't mean SMART.

Keeping an eye on SMART data via tools like Speedfan or CrystalDiskInfo is great, but as i said, if CHKDSK is finding & repairing errors, you've usually got bigger issues.

So when i say manufacturers tools, i mean run them & if they fail, it's time for RMA...

 

[Ken90630]

Okay, forgive me for being dense , but what tools? As I said, I've looked at WD's Data Lifeguard and Seagate's Sea Tools and don't see that they offer anything that CheckDisk doesn't do by itself. What am I missing here?

 

[Nothinman]

The manufacturer tools run the SMART self-tests, chkdsk runs over the filesystem (NTFS or FAT) and checks it. Chkdsk also has a bad blocks scan that will try to read every sector on the disk and if there's a problem it'll mark it bad in the MFT or FAT.

 

[Ken90630]

Again, sorry for being dense (still) , but I can't find these mfgr "tools" that run the S.M.A.R.T tests. I've looked on both Seagate's and WD's Web sites and can't find any diagnostics besides Sea Tools and Data Lifeguard, respectively (neither of which say anything about running S.M.A.R.T. tests).

 

[taltamir]

did you make sure to tell chkdsk to look for bad sectors? in a regular scan it doesn't

 

[Ken90630]

Originally posted by: taltamir
did you make sure to tell chkdsk to look for bad sectors? in a regular scan it doesn't

Yeah, I always check both of the boxes.

 

[VeryCharBroiled]

SMART tests are internal to the drive, it does them itself.

SPEEDFAN can report SMART data. it doesnt run the tests, it just reports what the drive itself has come up with.

 

[VeryCharBroiled]

double post

 

[Nothinman]

SPEEDFAN can report SMART data. it doesnt run the tests, it just reports what the drive itself has come up with.

Something still has to tell the drive to run the test, the drives don't do it on their own.

 

[MerlinRML]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

SPEEDFAN can report SMART data. it doesnt run the tests, it just reports what the drive itself has come up with.

Something still has to tell the drive to run the test, the drives don't do it on their own.

I warn you now, I'm being picky about wording. Read on at your own peril

Because the SMART test doesn't do any real testing when you run it in the manufacturer's tools, speedfan could be useful in a different way if it just shows raw data (I'm not familiar with speedfan). SMART is just a set of counters (semi-realtime) and threshold (static) values. If the counter reports a value outside of the threshold (I use outside because some are higher, some are lower), then an application that queries that information could act on it and alert the user to the problem. This is what the manufacturer's tools do when they do the SMART test, but they don't usually tell you anything more than there is a SMART error. Seeing what the actual values are and figuring out what they mean could be more interesting than just knowing that the drive has a SMART error.

There's also a performance hit every time there is a SMART poll, so you don't want to poll too agressively if you're running SMART monitoring apps.

 

[Ken90630]

I appreciate all the replies :beer: , but I still don't know how to run the S.M.A.R.T. tests. WD's Data Lifeguard and Seagate's Sea Tools say nothing about S.M.A.R.T. tests. So again, what tools do I use to run S.M.A.R.T.? What do I install, or click on, or ???

 

[VeryCharBroiled]

you dont "run" SMART. the drive itself is "running" SMART all the time. you run a program that reports SMART data.

SMART = Self Monitoring Analysis & Reporting Technology. all modern hard drives have SMART built in.

every time the drive powers up or accesses data it checks the result of whatever it did. did it take longer than usual to find data. were there any correctable errors (IE errors you and the OS never see, the drive re reads or corrects it on its own)? do any bad sectors need to be relocated to the spare sectors (drives have special reserve sectors to take the place of factory and age generated bad sectors.. you and CHECKDSK never see these either until it runs out of spares and is forced to report then to the OS)? did it take longer than usual to spin up?

all that stuff, plus more, is monitored by the drive itself, and this technology of self monitoring is known as SMART. SMART data can be read and interpreted by many programs, the BIOS and the OS.

manufacturer diagnostics and such can also report SMART data but they also run more involved tests. these other tests are not considered SMART, they are manufacturer diagnostic routines.

 

[Nothinman]

you dont "run" SMART. the drive itself is "running" SMART all the time. you run a program that reports SMART data.

Kind of. Yes there are are counters that the drives maintain themselves without any interaction but there are also self-tests that you have to initiate if you want them to run. Daemons like smartd on Linux run these automatically and email the results if there's a problem.

 

[BlueAcolyte]

Originally posted by: Ken90630
I appreciate all the replies :beer: , but I still don't know how to run the S.M.A.R.T. tests. WD's Data Lifeguard and Seagate's Sea Tools say nothing about S.M.A.R.T. tests. So again, what tools do I use to run S.M.A.R.T.? What do I install, or click on, or ???

Those are the correct tools, they should have a diagnostic of some kind.