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Hard Drive Diagnostic Software

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tinjaw:
Today an unfortunate event brought to light a gap in my knowledge. I knocked a 300 GB portable hard drive off of my desk and onto the carpeted floor. The drive shows up and I tried to use the built-in error-checking tool (scandisk) that is part of Windows XP but I get an error dialog about 75% of the way through.

Checking Disk (F:)
Windows was unable to complete the disk check.

I shut my laptop and the hard drive down and went to work. I started them both up here at work and got the same error.

I am aware of tools from the various hard drive manufacturers to diagnose the hard drive itself. These programs will tell me if I have any trouble with the hard drives, but will not tell me about any problems with the data that is on the drive. I need to know what files, if any, have been lost or damaged. I want to know if I need to reformat the drive and check for bad sectors.

I realized that I have always relied on Scandisk for this and I do not know of any alternatives. What software do you suggest I use?

f0dder:
Humm... drive vendor diagnostic tools typically will not work when the drive is attached via USB or FireWire, but requires you to attach via SATA or IDE - and typically only works when connected to the "main" IDE/SATA ports, not RAID ports etc...

The quick SMART scan typically doesn't tell you anything, or at least nothing you don't know (the one thing that is worth watching for is "reallocated sector count", nonzero means get rid of the drive... but you should have detected that because of clicking noises before seeing it on SMART stats).

If you run a full surface scan (could be called differently in the diagnostic tool), each sector of the drive should be checked, and afaik this will also kick in sector reallocation for bad sectors. Problem is, I dunno if you can get a list of the sectors that have been reallocated, and even if you did... I don't know a program that will tell you which files on the filesystem contain those sectors.

Sorry, this was a lot of text and not much help, I'm afraid :/

Ralf Maximus:
While I detest Steve Gibson's hysterics sometimes, his SpinRite low-level disk scanner has brought some dead drives back to life for me.  Its not free, however: $89

Was the drive running when it fell to the floor?  If so the head might've crashed... that's pretty catastrophic.

tinjaw:
f0dder, Ralf,

Thanks for the tips.

f0dder, I understand about the limitations of the USB connection, but I was already prepared to take it out of the case and put it in a sled and into a box with a drive bay to test it if need be.

Ralf, The head crashing was the first thing I thought about when I realized the drive had fallen. It was on, but 1) may have been in power-saver mode 2) the power cord was what I tripped on and it pulled the power from the drive, so that may also have caused the heads to go to park.

Outside of attempting to copy each file to another drive, can you think of any way to test all of the files on the drive? I also understand that just because the file copies, that doesn't mean it isn't damaged in some other manner.

ChalkTrauma:
How about:

http://www.hdtune.com/

and

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

I also bricked a eGo portable USB drive and used Knoppix to get it back, you can view my post here:

http://www.iomegasupportforums.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=10029&highlight=knoppix

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