Scan Hard Drive for Errors

Although hard drive technology have advanced a lot during the last couple of years, it’s inevitable that they all still wear down over time. Hard drives have broken the terabyte mark and you would be the laughing stock if you have anything less than 100-150GB in your computer. In this short article, I will show you one free utility that you can use to scan your hard drive surface for errors along with a paid one that can do so much more. Another method will be one that can be accessed directly within Windows.

When it comes to computer hard drives, you’ll always want to be proactive instead of reactive. It’s always best to know beforehand the status of your hard drive before it’s too late. If you followed my advice on how to easily backup your important data, you’ll have less to worry about when your hard drive does indeed hit the bricks other than the small inconvenience of replacing the actual hard drive itself and exporting the data back. Doing a scan of your hard drive for errors is especially important when you buy a new or used hard drive to see if you are getting short changed or not.

# HD Tune
This small utility will give you a better insight as to your hard drive’s current status. The awesome part is that it gives you the ability to scan your hard drive’s surface for errors. It is completely easy to use.
Once you open the utility, you’ll quickly notice 4 tabs along with the current temperature of your hard drive. If you have more than one physical hard drive installed, you can easily select which one to focus on by using the drop down menu and selecting the different hard drive.
The first tab is the Benchmark tab. Because we are using the free version of the software, it will only tell us the Maximum and Minimum Transfer Rate. Next to this is the Info tab. This section will tell you what features is supported by your hard drive as well showing your hard drive’s partition information. Next up is the the Health tab. You can quickly glance at your hard drive’s status by looking at the Health Status info located at the bottom right corner. Here, you can also look at some of the data being collected on your hard drive as well. The last tab should be of the most interest. On the Error Scan tab, you can do a scan on your hard drive’s surface to see if there are any bad sectors. You have the option to either do a full scan or a quick scan. On a full scan, it will take much longer (especially if your hard drive is large in size) but will be much more thorough. Here the information will be presented to you in a grid with hundreds of tiny gray blocks that represents your hard drive. After you hit the Start button, the scan will proceed and good sectors will be marked in green while bad sectors will be marked in red. Obviously, if your hard drive is healthy, every block will be green. If you have one or two red blocks, it’s not the end of the world. However, if you are presented with dozens and dozens of returned red blocks, then obviously you should consider replacing your hard drive soon.

# Windows built-in hard drive error-checking tool
Windows also includes their own hard drive error scanning tool. First, open up My Computer and right click on the hard disk you want to scan for errors and select the Properties option. Click on the Tools tab and select the Scan Now button under Error Checking. You will be presented with a dialog box with the ability to check/uncheck two options. If you uncheck both options, the scan will only report problems but not fix them. To automatically check and repair for files and folder errors, check Automatically Fix File System Errors. To perform a more in-depth scan and have the tool actually attempt to repair bad sectors that it finds(something that HD Tune can’t do), check the Scan for and Attempt Recovery of Bad Sectors check box. If the hard drive you are scanning consist of your Windows system partition, you will need to restart the computer and the scan will proceed before you login.

If your hard drive has the S.M.A.R.T. (Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Tool) feature (most hard drives sold on the market does), then it can report to you when it detects your hard drive is going bad. If you see a message at computer boot time telling you that your hard drive is damaged or has bad sectors, please do not ignore it! Many times users dismiss this important message as if nothing happened. You should immediately backup all of your important data. While it’s certainly possible to continue using the hard drive, as soon as you experience random lockups, crashes, blue screens of death or any other ill symptoms, you’ll want to physically replace the hard drive with a new one.

No article on hard drive repair can be complete without mentioning Steve Gibson’s (one of the most notable computer security guru out there) SpinRite software. Although it isn’t free, the ability of this small little program have saved hundreds if not thousands of computer user’s hard drives. This low level utility delves deep into your hard drive and can actually repair the worst of damaged sectors in hopes of recovering data and making your computer bootable again when it couldn’t before. The tool does much more and it would take me a very long time to write about it. Instead, visit SpinRite’s homepage and take a look yourself. However, do realize that SpinRite is NOT a data recovery software.