i need hardisk assistance please.

[aidynphoenix]

hello im not sure if i have a faulty drive or not..
i have a 500gb segate baricudda drive its about 2yrs old..
it had my win7 installation on it..
i have been playing starcraft for a few weeks and sometimes sc would make the computer completely freeze up. so the only thing i could do was a hard reset.

eventually i found that my music files and videos wernt playing right from that drive..
and the drives read speeds were changing ALOT between 11 and 100mb sec

so i reformated the drive and installed windows on a different drive..
i ran a win7 scandisk on that drive.. and ofcoarce it didnt tell me any details about what it found out..
so i ran hdtune and it found a few bad blocks..

now the drive seems to be working correctly.
the files i copy onto the drive seem to be playing fine.. and well.. i even copied manny gb of useless junk to fill up the begining portion of the drive so that i am useing the middle and end of the drive when i play files off of it..

is there any programs that can give a really in depth scan of my drive and let me know if it is safe to use and count on again?

 

[sahabcse]

Have you tried the default scan steps. The details given below for default error scanning

• Open Computer by clicking the Start button , and then clicking Computer.
• Right-click the hard disk drive that you want to check, and then click Properties.
• Click the Tools tab, and then, under Error-checking, click Check Now. If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.
  To automatically repair problems with files and folders that the scan detects, select Automatically fix file system errors. Otherwise, the disk check will simply report problems but not fix them.
  To perform a thorough disk check, select Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors. This scan attempts to find and repair physical errors on the hard disk itself, and it can take much longer to complete.
  To check for both file errors and physical errors, select both Automatically fix file system errors and Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors.
• Click Start.

Depending upon the size of your hard disk, this may take several minutes. For best results, don't use your computer for any other tasks while it's checking for errors.

 

[aidynphoenix]

yea i did that already.. with both checkboxes selected.. it took damn near two hours to complete. but after it is finished.. it still doesent tell you if it found anything or not..

 

[Celegorm]

If it's a seagate drive, you can use seagate's SeaTools to run an indepth scan on the drive and see it's real health. You can get the bootable version and the windows version from here: | Seagate

 

[sahabcse]

Try HDDScan is a freeware utility for hard drive diagnostics (RAID arrays, Flash USB and SSD drives are also supported). The program can test storage device for errors (Bad-blocks and bad sectors), show S.M.A.R.T. attributes and change some HDD parameters such as AAM, APM, etc.

 

[aidynphoenix]

thanks! will do.

thanks for the assistance guys..
sofar i ran hdtune twice on the drive scanning for errors.. it found 10 bad blocks.. (im guessing it doesent fix them) i saved a screenshot of the bad blocks each time. each time it ran it found the exact same number of bad blocks and in the same places..
i ran another win7 scandisk on the drive this time it gave me a box saying it found 12 errors.. so i ran scandisk once again and it said it didnt find any errors..

what i plan to do is start copying stuff onto the drive and make it work for alittle while..
after i think it has done a decient amount of work i plan to run another hdtune scan and compare the previous results to my new ones.. this way i will be able to see if new blocks are getting damaged.
if the drive seems ok. i will put it into use again. only this time it will be for unimportant tasks like a spare computer or a external hardisk.

 

[aidynphoenix]

stuffed 370gb onto the disk. and ran some programs and played movies off of it all day.
scandisk and hdtune is not finding any more bad sectors.. i guess it is alright.

 

[Indigo]

The reason it's not finding any bad sectors now is because the steps you took already have remapped the drives bad sectors. Chkdsk DOES tell you what is going on with the disk, but you have to either be very fast in watching the results text, or know how to check your system logs. The results are commonly available by searching for "chkdsk" in the filters. It'll be under the system logs. The full chkdsk is the easiest way to run a test for bad sectors - it will often tell you how many are bad and what has been done to repair those (usually by remapping.) Alternatively, running a tool like SeaTools will also help check for bad sectors, as mentioned by celegorm.

 

[aidynphoenix]

im guessing that reseting your computer or kiling the power usually just damages blocks on the hdd..
although i thought that the heads never touch the rotating platter.. i dont understand how it could damage it if that were the case.

 

[Indigo]

No, turning the power off or losing power on a system won't cause heads to crash on a hard drive, as long as you aren't throwing the drive around, stomping on it while it's running, etc. Sometimes you get things like bit flipping which can corrupt data (reads a 0 when it should say 1, etc) or sometimes the material on the drive wears out, loses its magnetic charge, and you start developing bad areas on the drive. Resetting a computer or losing power doesn't incite those kinds of problems.