Good Disk Error Scanning software

hi guys!

are there any good disk scanning software utilities (beside the windows one)?

 

I always use the ones supplied by the harddrive manufacturer. Some of them work regardless of the supplier, ex: you could sometimes use one like samsungs for a hitachi etc.

 

Do you mean a scanner that checks for software problems like truncated files or what not? Or do you mean a scanner that checks for hardware related problems?

For software, you may as well just use the built-in Windows one.
For hardware, go with what iOsiris stated, use the one from the hard disk manaufacturer.

 

This is overkill, but the best program around for analyzing hard drives for defects or problems (and 9 times out of 10 fixing those problems) is SpinRite. It's a great program that runs independant of any OS (boots into its own FreeDOS environment) and can handle any disk, any size, on just about any filesystem.

If your HDD has taken a dump and you need to recover what's on it, take a good look at SpinRite. Lots of people have used it and been able to recover their data. The only bad thing about it is that it costs $89 without a prior version.

 

Another one that doesn't even boot off the hard disk, so it has full access to everything, and has many different system tools and such:

http://sysresccd.org/Main_Page

I always keep a copy on-hand since it's just so handy.

 

HDTune scans your hard drive for bad sectors.

 

which utility fixes bad sectors?