Hard drive testing
Miscellaneous Forums/General Discussion/Hard drive testing
Is there any software that does a complete hard drive scan and repairs (where possible) any problems?
I have an external hard drive (the one I nearly blew up some months ago by forgetting to turn the power off when I plugged a molex connector into it - it used to be internal, connected via IDE).
When accessing it, it sometimes hangs for a couple of minutes and at the moment its more annoying than anything else. Thing is, my last eight years of work are backed up on it (and on DVD as well) and it amounts to about 40GB of stuff.
So, any software that's good for giving it a once-over? I don't care if I lose a bit of space to bad sectors.
I'm not sure about software, but have you tried Windows defrag/repair tool?
Hard drives are incredibly cheap these days - you'd probably be better off getting a new drive. You can get a 250gb external drive for about $70.
Spinrite seems to be a highly recommened tool in general.
I used it long while back. It's pretty much the dogs counter-balance do-dars. Especially with the methods it uses to try and recover the bad sectors by jumping around and diving back in on the sector for instance.
http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htmCheck out the video on the site too
use checkdsk or chkdisk the second one. Run it in a console window, that works pretty well.
I bought a 320GB WD SATA 2 at the local store for $47 the other week when repairing someones puter and backing up data from a dodgy drive. HD's really are getting cheap now.
I'd just get your data off the drive and backed up to another one while you still can.
In my experience, once HDs start playing up in any way, they can never be persuaded to get well again.
No spare cash to replace it right now.
Spinrite might be good, but I could buy a new drive for less than I'd have to pay for that.
Running a windows error check on the drive now. Its stuck at 9,300 files. I think its screwed, tbh.
Do you have a flash drive or something? Maybe you could zip the important files and stash them on some other drive. If not, maybe you could compress and password protect them, and put them on a free file sharing website (don't give out the key!). Or you could email them to yourself, but I doubt there's an inbox big enough for that. You said you had it backed up on DVD? Bad idea. In my experiance, discs usually fail at the worst possible time, and they're nearly impossible to recover.
Seriously - find some way of backing them up quickly. Your drive is probably cooked. Maybe disconnect it/don't use it until you have a backup ready - using it may push it over the edge, and totally fry your drive.
8 years of work in one place, on a faulty drive? Looks like a train wreck in slow motion. Don't become another one of those "this is why you need to back up" stories - find a way to back up your data immediately!!!
8 years of work in one place, on a faulty drive? Looks like a train wreck in slow motion. Don't become another one of those "this is why you need to back up" stories - find a way to back up your data immediately!!!
Thing is, my last eight years of work are backed up on it (and on DVD as well)
You said you had it backed up on DVD? Bad idea. In my experiance, discs usually fail at the worst possible time, and they're nearly impossible to recover.
I'm just trying to help here. :-)
Starting to think its the front USB ports on my PC that are cruddy.
Got the drive plugged into a rear one now and everything is copying over to my spare drive with no problems so far (although there's still an hour to go).
When its done I'll format the drive and check it out without fear of losing anything.
I think I found out why it apparently stopped on file 9,351. I have a file on the drive that's 23GB. So, that's probably why. :)
you can probably find a decent 40-50gb harddrive for around $20-30. I usually have a spare junk PC that no one wants. I end up taking it off their hands. I rip the hard drives and other reuseable parts from them..