M17x - best program to check hard drive for bad sectors?

Alright so about half of the programs I download say that they are corrupt. I had to download F.E.A.R. 2 from Direct2Drive 3 times last night (and at 11GB a pop, its not a joking matter) because the archive was consistently corrupt. Now today I downloaded PCMark Vantage and I will have to redownload it because it says it was corrupt as well. The same thing happened after I had installed F.E.A.R. 2 and tried install the 100-104 patch. It said the files were corrupt. I chose to ignore it and the game seems to be fine but I'm worried the hard drive may be failing.

Anyone have any good tips for testing the hard drive? Preferably a fast program... I remember back in the DOS days (last time I had to scan for bad sectors) it took like an hour per gig.

 

It still takes a long time. If you don't use raid hdtune will scan it for you.

 

I'm not running RAID but none of the programs I have tried so far will detect the drive and, of course, turning AHCI to ATA mode causes Vista to fail to start...

They can't seem to get access to the SMART data... Even Seagate's Seatools won't see the drive.

 

Very odd. It definitely should work. Your other option is through dell diagnostics which can be accessed by booting off your resource DVD.

 

I got HDTune to work. It still can't read the SMART data, temps, or anything else, but it is scanning the drive at ~95MB/sec. +rep

 

Try this Western digital HDD diagnostic utils , it works with any make on HD, and will show your smart data.

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=702&sid=3&lang=en

 

The problem is that it looks like the BIOS locks out apps from accessing the SMART data... HDTune is scanning just fine, it can't read temps, SMART, or any other data though.

I hope the hard drive isn't bad but I can't think what else would be corrupting my downloads. If its not this... I have no clue what it would be.

 

I have had hdtune not read the smart data on a lot of different notebooks , try the wd util i linked it normaly can read the smart.

 

Once HDTune is done scanning I'll give the WD tool a try... but if the Seagate tool didn't find it and its a Seagate drive, I'd be really surprised.

 

Actually there are a lot of reports (mine included, and BatBoy's) that say if you have a Seagate Momentus 500GB drive, your temps and SMART info cannot be seen with the programs you mentioned.

I use HDTune to check for the bad sectors and it works. I also did a CHKDSK (took very long) but it said all good. So far, there seems to be no way of checking SMART data on most of these drives.

So, do you have one of these drives? If you do, you are not alone. At least the HDTune check should help.

 

Yeah I have the Seagate Momentus 500GB drive...

So far I don't have any bad sectors and its halfway done with the scan. That means I'm going to have to look elsewhere to figure out where the data corruption is coming in. *grrr*

Its this guy to be specific: http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...ecadd110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD&locale=en-US

Kind of stupid that you can't even monitor the drive temperature... Is it JUST these drives that have the issue???

 

I haven't had a chance to install Everest to see if it will report HDD temps but I did come across this freeware app which looks promising... HWiNFO32. Supports the MC79A chipset. SMART data is returned - not the best format IMO, but its there. HDD Temps as well.

 

How on Earth do I read that SMART data? It says "Worst" for a number of things... Raw read, spin up time, start/stop count, reallocated sector count, seek error rate, power-on time count, spin retry count, power cycle count, etc. It has values like my seek error rate being 66/30??

 

So the scan finished and I don't have a single bad sector. I wonder what the heck is corrupting my downloads... Maybe I need to reduce my overclock a bit on the processor...

 

Has anyone tried Auslogic's Defrag tool? I've heard good things about it and been meaning too myself but never got around to it.

 

The Auslogics Defrag tool...Trust me, it's worth downloading and installing it. Fastest defragmenter out there-defragmented about 140GB on my hard drive in about half an hour.

 

any for ssd drives ??

 

I don't think it is a good idea to defragment SSD. I think I read that somewhere.

 

That defrag program is awesome btw. Thanks lordqarlyn. +rep

 

imo best program to test the overall health of a drive is still spin rite. it takes A LONG time to run a full test but imo its worth it if there is even the slightest concern about a drive. still one of the best ever even though it is aging now

imo best defrag out there is puran defrag. it can move things others could not and does the best job i have found at a full boot time. perfect disk and Auslogics fell flat on their face with large files on a near full drive where puran plugged right along without even a hint of trouble. and i still say its the fastest i have used. 20$ for a lifetime lic is awesome also and fully 64bit compatible

 

NO YOU SHOULD not defrag ssd drives...

 

I just spent 2500 on my machine, I can't afford to buy more programs for it so Auslogic it is lol

 

Cant you just put in your alien resource dvd and do a harddrive test with that. (custom test and then choose harddrive) they are very thural. sorry if i misspelled something

Edit: i just saw that mandrake already suggested this.

 

It wasn't my harddrive. It was my overclock.