[BBLISA] windows disk diagnostics

[Scott Ehrlich]

On Sat, 2 Feb 2008, Eric Smith wrote:

> 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

I have found, over time, at least for pre-Vista (simply haven't used Vista 
enough to know) that Windows will present unusual activity when the drive 
is going bad.  The most obvious, and common, I've seen is Windows 
complaining that pagefile.sys is running low and the system needs more 
swap space - this after the system has been running fine for the longest 
time and, in viewing available disk space, it shows ample space.

Otherwise, just visit the Event Viewer and check the System logs.  Look 
for yellow and red.   I've seen plenty of markings showing a bad sector on 
/device/drive0/c (or something similar).  Be careful to note the drive 
letter, and match it to your hard drive.  I once mistook such errors from 
the CD/DVD drive, and had to realize the hard drive was a single partition 
(C) and the light turned on that the CD/DVD drive was drive D, which told 
me either the CD drive or media was causing problems, _NOT_ the hard 
drive.

Also, don't forget that Seagate _somewhat_ recently purchased Maxtor, and 
most of us know Maxtor has a horrible reputation for quality.  Thus, for 
consumer-grade hard drives, you _might_ have a rebadged Maxtor drive that 
now says Seagate.  Good luck!

Scott

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