Do you think your hard drive is about to fail? Do you hear strange clicks coming from your hard drive?
Does your computer randomly freeze and are you sure you don’t have a virus or other hardware problem? It’s definitely not fun to suspect that your hard drive is going to fail soon, but it happens all the time.
Of course, it is best to back up all important and important data first. If the hard disk has errors, data loss may not happen immediately, but it can be slow over time. In this article, I will show you several different ways to check the health of your hard drive and see if there are any errors on it.
Method 1 – Run Chkdsk.exe
The first thing you can do is run Windows built-in error checking tool called chkdsk.exe. You can run it from the command line or through Windows Explorer.
Open Computer, right-click the drive you want to check and select Properties.
Now go to the Tools tab and click the Check Now button.
You can choose to automatically fix file system errors as well as scan and repair bad sectors on your hard drive.
The second method – SeaTools
This free program from Seagate is one of the most popular diagnostic tools for testing hard drives. Despite being from Seagate, it works with hard drives from all manufacturers.
It will give you a status message for each drive and tell you if there are any tests that failed. You can download SeaTools from here:
http: //www.segate.com/support/downloads/seatools/
Please note that various manufacturers such as Dell, Hitachi, Samsung, etc. also provide their own set of diagnostic tools for hard drives. You can search Google and download a tool for your specific brand of hard drive. I’ve listed two below:
Western Digital DataLifeguard Diagnostic
Samsung WANTED
I’ve also written about other free hard drive diagnostic tools, so be sure to check them out.
Third method – check disk
If you’re not entirely sure what’s going on with your hard drive, you can use the free DiskCheckup utility to monitor your hard drive and tell you if it exceeds any of the maximum thresholds set by the hard drive manufacturer.
Of course, all of these tools require a drive that supports SMART (Self Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology). A SMART drive has many different monitors that it reports, such as spin up time, hard drive temperature, run time, etc.
DiskCheckup can run in the background and monitor all of these indicators and then notify you via email if any of these thresholds are exceeded. You can download it here:
http: //www.passmark.com/products/disksnechku.htm
Other free software
If you’re curious, there are several other free hard drive testing and diagnostics tools worth trying:
1. Speccy – http://www.piriform.com/speccy
2. Hard disk status – http://www.panterasoft.com/
3. TestDisk – http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
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