Hard disk failure is possibly the worst thing that can happen to your
computer and it often occurs without giving any warning signs.
Test Your Hard Drive for
Impending Problems
You may however run certain tests on your computer beforehand to get an
idea about the current condition of your hard disk. This should in turn help
you decide whether a replacement drive is necessary or not.
Step 1: Check your hard
disk for errors
All recent versions of Windows include a utility called Chkdsk.exe that
can check your hard disk for any bad sectors.
You may either run Chkdsk from the command line (see details) or launch
Windows Explorer, right click the drive that you wish to examine and choose
Properties. Switch to the Tools tab and click the “Check Now” button under
Error checking. Select “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” to
perform a thorough disk check.
Step 2: Understand the
sounds of your disk
Do you sometimes hear strange sounds coming out of the CPU box? Well,
if the hard drive is making those sounds, it could be an alarming situation and
your best bet would be that you turn off the computer before any further damage
is done to the disk.
But how do you distinguish between sounds coming from a hard disk with
noise that’s made by the fans or the power supply? Here’s a useful page where
you can listen to recorded sounds of various hard drives that have lead to a
crash. If your disk is making a similar sound, get a replacement quickly.
Step 3: Catch errors
before they happen
Disk Checkup is a free hard disk monitoring utility that displays tons
of diagnostic data about your disk. While the level of detail it provides may
easily confuse even tech-savvy users, just ignore the numbers and keep the utility
running in the background.
It monitors your disk’s temperature, read and write error rate, etc.
and will alert you when the values of any of these parameters approach
dangerous levels. These may be signs of an impending disk failure. Disk Checkup
is free for personal use.
Step 4: Thoroughly test
your Hard Disk
SeaTools is free diagnostic tool that can completely test your hard
drive regardless of the OS installed on it. The tool is provided by Seagate but
it works with non-Seagate disk drives as well.
To get started, you need to download the ISO image of SeaTools for DOS
and create a bootable CD. Now boot the computer with the CD in the drive,
accept the license agreement and run a long test (the full scan). If any
defects are found, a list will be offered at the end or after aborting the disk
scan.
Other computer vendors /disk manufactures including Samsung, Hitachi,
Toshiba (Fujitsu), Western Digital, Lenovo, Dell, etc. too offer
diagnostic tools that work only with their own brand of hard drives. If you are
having frequent computer problems (like system hangs or fails to boot up), you
may run these tools to confirm if the problems are hard drive related.
