[BBLISA] windows disk diagnostics

[Eric Smith]

Thanks for the great info.
>From a historical standpoint, I used Spinrite many, many years ago and
it was amazing.  Back in the days of Dos 5.1 I had it recover damaged
disks and do hardware based diagnostics.  It claimed to do wondrous
things and certainly seemed to do them - they disks worked great
afterwards.  I hadn't realized it was still around.

When the scandisk ran it listed about 12 files (without extensions, of
all things) of which many would have probably have been co-located on
the drive (copied to the disk at the same time and I don't defrag that
disk.)  When I searched for the listed files they were not found.
That made me wonder.  I also now have a found.000 hidden folder dated
today at the root of the drive (why do they do that way?  How do they
expect average users to know about hidden folders when they are not
visible by default?)

I should have been clear that I'm looking for program(s) that can fix
either/both file system and hard disk (hardware) issues.  The last, of
course, assuming they are fixable - many are not.

I'll definitely go get the SMART utility you suggest and see what it
says.  I definitely need to chance what I'm doing if reports a large
number of errors.

Why can't windows monitor the SMART statistics and warn us of stuff
out-of-the-box?  Does Vista?

Eric