What do you guys use to diagnose a hard drive, without an OS environment?

[Avalon]

As the title asks. Just curious what you guys like to use. I really need a bootable program that can run hard drive diagnostics.

 

[dma0991]

I am unsure as to the kind of diagnostics that you intend to do with your HDD. There are several methods that I use but all of them involves Linux. Usually I would use Ubuntu LiveCD, Slax, PuppyLinux. All of them are OS but they would run off a CD or a thumbdrive.

 

[Avalon]

Just to check for any SMART failures, bad sectors, etc. Running a live linux environment is fine. I just meant I needed something that wouldn't run off the hard drive, since it's suspected to be bad. I have a hardware machine that checks out hard drives, but it also wipes their data at the same time and I don't want to do that just yet.

 

[KGB]

Ultimate Boot CD

 

[Zap]

Often the HDD manufacturer will provide a bootable ISO of their official diagnostic utility. "Official" as in if you try to RMA a drive, they ask for the error code their utility provides.

 

[dawks]

Spinrite is a great program to recover data from failing harddrives. Many harddrive issues are caused by bad sectors and spinrite can help address that problem. It works at the sector level and is data/filesystem agnostic.

Works wonders.

 

[lord_emperor]

Seatools will test any drive but if you want to RMA a non-Seagate drive you will need to use the one provided by the manufacturer.

 

[Avalon]

Thanks guys!

 

[piasabird]

Most hard drive manufacturers have some kind of utility that you can download and put on some sort of bootable device.

 

[Lanyap]

I use Hitachi DFT. It works on all brands.

 

[corkyg]

UBCD; DFT; Spinrite; Seatools; etc. Got 'em all in a drawer.