Hard Drive Scanner

Hey-

My friend knocked my external hard drive off of a counter on to a tile floor last night. The fall was about 3 - 4 feet. The case pulled apart and the drive moved somewhat out of the case in the fall. I was playing fear at the time and fear worked afterwards, but I want to completely check the hard drive for damage. I cant imagine that the hard drive would be completely fine after a fall like that. That way if there will/are problems with the drive I can save my files, backups, etc and get my friend to buy me a new drive. I want to see if there are program that I can use to scan the hard drive for damage.

 

just plug it in and see if still works...are the USB/Firewire ports intact...?

Can you see the disk platter? If so, I reckon your data is totally destroyed.

 

Sorry....It connects to the computer still and I was able to play my copy of fear last night....which is mounted as an image on the external drive. The hard drive came out of the external enclosure but the hard drive's case itself did not break.... ie i couldnt see the platters or any of the inside of the drive. thanks for the help

I'm just trying to see if there is any dammage that I might miss or that might cause issues down the line. Id rather take care of it now then have issues when/if it dies on me.

 

You can use checkdisk, which is built into Windows. Just go to start -> run -> chkdsk.exe and it will start.

 

You can also open up "My Computer", right-click on the external drive's letter/icon, go to "Properties", then the "Tools" tab of that. There's a "Check Now..." button. Hit that, and it runs chkdsk on that drive. If you just run chkdsk.exe like you said, mZimm, it only runs it on the main (usually C: ) drive.

 

If you have a copy of SpinRite by grc.com it can do a complete surface scan checking for damage. And move questionable data to a safe area. Most drives auto park when not being accessed, in this mode than can withstand high g-force.

 

HD Tune, its great to read temperature, speed, and check for errors.

 

Most HDD makers have diag programs that you can get from their website as well. Lots of programs can use SMART to check for possible future failures as well

 

Ill check to see if I can download one of the above mentioned programs. Thanks for the suggestions.

While running chkdsk the process stops working at 48% on stage 4 of the check. It indicates that the check disc can not complete, but does not give a specific error message. This has happened muiltiple times, both within cmd and properties, tools, check disc.

The drive appears to not be accessing anything, and isnt making any strange noises when chkdsk stops. Also it hangs at 48% for a long time before giving an error.

I believe I have read something about issues with USB drives and chkdsk failing. Does anyone know anything about this? I might have to stick it in a desktop and use chkdsk or another program.

My real issue is that I have found many hard drive programs that check for health, many using the SMART system, but most do not detect external drives. They look on the ATA channels for drives only it seems.

 

I attached the hard drive internally and proceeded to run scans on the drive. Its fitness (Speed Fan) is 26% and there is a warning on the SMART attribute Reallocated Sectors. Nothing has failed yet, but I have a value of 218 with the critical point at 63. The rest of the numbers are fairly standard, but the reallocated sectors seems to be the issue that occured as a result of the fall. In HD Tune I have one block of 114 MB that is red. Is that enough to require the purchase of a new drive.
Does Maxtor have a good way to tell if the hard drive has fallen? Is the drive on the way out, or if I'm careful will the bad sectors not spread? Its under warranty, but I'd imagine that they would be able to see that there was shock/impact damage.

 

Unless your drive is physically damaged on the outside, I see no way of them knowing it was dropped. I'm not sure how Maxtor warrants their hard drives that have reallocated sectors but still function. If they are willing to replace the drive, go for it. I'd back up any data that you want to keep asap though. I have a 250GB Maxtor IDE/ATA133 that bit the dust quite quickly after I discovered that it had reallocated sectors.