Thourough testing of a hard drive?

[cubby1223]

Have someone's computer here which was giving them troubles. Event viewer has on average an entry per day (for past 2 weeks) labeled ntfs and noting data corruption. Has the directory "found.000" also noting recovered data from bad sectors.

But after running "chkdsk /f/r" no bad sectors are marked, some fixes were performed, and everything looks well. Any other time I've dealt with a failing drive, chkdsk finds errors and bad sectors. So in other words, what more can I do further to test this drive and see if it's good or not? Drive was already cloned, fyi. It's from an oem machine, no manufacturer warranty. It's a 250gb sata drive, so worth an effort.

 

[mruffin75]

I'd run the hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic software on the drive first... that'll tell you if any bad sectors have been encountered by the drive, or any other errors..

You didn't mention the drive manuf... but you can get pretty much all of them on the Ultimate Boot CD.. (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com)

That would be the first step..

 

[cubby1223]

It's a Seagate. And I don't know, I've had Western Digital's Data Lifeguard software tell me drives were perfect, when it was obvious they were not. I'll go give SeaTools a try.

 

[daveybrat]

The new Seatools on the latest Ultimate Boot CD or from Seagate does a pretty decent job at testing as long as you run the Long test. I also run the IBM fitness test (also on UBCD) as a second test just to verify sometimes. I find that Seatools and Fitness test are the best and most powerful programs i've used. WD's test is worthless.

If the drive passes Seatools and Fitness test, i think it's good to go.