home Questions Diagnosis and elimination of errors on the hard drive. Checking the hard drive for health

Diagnosis and elimination of errors on the hard drive. Checking the hard drive for health

Good afternoon.

In today's article I want to touch the heart of the computer - hard drive(By the way, many people call the processor the heart, but I personally don’t think so. If the processor burns out, buy a new one and there are no problems; if the hard drive burns out, then information cannot be restored in 99% of cases).

When to check HDD on performance and bad sectors? They do it first when they buy new hard disk, and secondly, when the computer is unstable: you have strange noises (); when accessing a file - the computer freezes; long copying of information from one hard disk partition to another; missing files and folders, etc.

In this article, I would like to tell in a simple language how to check a hard drive for bads, to assess its performance in the future, and to sort out typical user questions along the way.

So, let's begin…

Updated on 12/07/2015. Not so long ago, an article appeared on the blog about the recovery of bad sectors (treatment of bad blocks) with the HDAT2 program - (I think the link will be relevant for this article). Its main difference from MHDD and Victoria is support for almost any disk with interfaces: ATA/ATAPI/SATA, SSD, SCSI and USB.

1. What do we need?

Before proceeding with the testing operation, in cases where the hard disk is not stable, I recommend copying all important files from the disk to other media: flash drives, external HDD etc. ().

1) Need a special program for testing and recovery hard working disk. There are a lot of similar programs, I recommend using one of the most popular - Victoria. Below are the download links

2) Next, a multi-colored program window will appear in front of us: go to the “Standard” tab. The upper right side shows hard drives and CD-Rom that are installed in the system. Choose your hard drive you want to test. Then press the "Passport" button. If everything goes well, then you will see how your hard drive model is determined. See picture below.

If the hard disk controller is operating in AHCI (Native SATA) mode, SMART attributes may not be obtained, with the message “Get S.M.A.R.T. command… Error reading S.M.A.R.T!”. The inability to receive SMART data is also indicated by the “Non ATA” highlighted in red during the initialization of the media, the controller of which does not allow the use of ATA interface commands, including the request for SMART attributes.

In this case, you need to go to BIOS and in the Config->>Serial ATA (SATA)->>SATA Controller Mode Option->>tab change from AHCI to Compatibility. After finishing testing with Victoria, change the setting to the way it was before.

You can read more about how to change ACHI to IDE (Compatibility) in my other article:

4) Now go to the "Test" tab and press the "Start" button. In the main window, on the left, rectangles painted in different colors will start to appear. It is best if they are all grey.

You need to focus your attention on the red and blue rectangles (the so-called bad sectors, about them at the very bottom). It is especially bad if there are a lot of blue rectangles on the disk, in this case it is recommended to check the disk again, only with the “Remap” checkbox enabled. In this case, the Victoria program will hide the found bad sectors. Thus, the restoration hard drives, which began to behave unstable.

By the way, after such a recovery, the hard drive will not always work for a long time. If he has already begun to “crumble”, then hope for a program - personally, I would not. If available a large number blue and red rectangles - it's time to think about a new hard drive. By the way, on a new hard drive, blue blocks are not allowed at all! experienced users call bad sectors (meaning bad, not readable). Such unreadable sectors can occur both during the manufacture of a hard disk and during its operation. All the same, the hard drive is a mechanical device.

During operation, the magnetic disks in the hard drive case rotate rapidly, and the reading heads move above them. If the device is bumped, struck, or a software error occurs, it may happen that the heads hit or fall to the surface. Thus, almost certainly, a bad sector will appear.

In general, this is not scary, and many disks have such sectors. The disk file system is able to isolate such sectors from file copy/read operations. Over time, the number of bad sectors may increase. But, as a rule, the hard drive often becomes unusable for other reasons before the bad sectors “kill” it. Also, bad sectors can be isolated using special programs, one of which we used in this article. After such a procedure - usually, the hard drive starts to work more stable and better, however, it is not known how long this stability will last ...

Best…

Letter. A difficult question for the site administrator site and please answer in simple language, so that it would be clear to a simple user.

How to check the hard drive for health, and most importantly, is it possible to remove bad sectors from the hard disk or, as they are called, bad blocks, which, as it turned out, are of several types:
- physical (crumbling magnetic layer of working plates, chips, etc.),
- logical (sector logic errors), logical bad blocks, can also be attributed software bads, that is, soft-bads (file system errors).
Before writing to you, I have been investigating this issue for quite some time and I realized that ordinary user superficial and inaccurate information is known, namely: many people think that all bad sectors or bad blocks are removed by regular formatting, but this is not so. It turns out that it is impossible to remove physical bads at all, but logical ones can only be removed with the help of special programs and only software bad blocks or soft bads (file system errors) can be removed with ordinary Windows tools, for example using or regular formatting. Why am I all this.

Recently, I had to go to a service center about the strange behavior of my computer. Firstly, periodic freezes were observed, lasting for several seconds, and sometimes for good, I had to restart the computer with the Reset button. Occasionally, strange clicks and creaks were heard from the hard drive. Strange folders without names were found in the system. The simple process of copying a file from one hard drive partition to another took an awfully long time. Also, the operating system often checked the hard disk for errors when the computer was turned on, and the last time it issued BOOTMGR is missing on a black screen, given error restored with the help of the installation disk of the seven, but a day later, when booting up, the computer gave out just a black screen, I thought enough was enough and contacted the service center.

AT service center a technician checked my hard drive free program HDDScan.

Unfortunately, the master did not explain anything when checking, he showed me only after checking the presence of 12 bad blocks (English bad sector, bad block, bad sectors-damaged) marked in blue by the program. Another 90 sectors were marked in red, they were not bad blocks yet, but their response time was not good, more than 500 ms.

The wizard also showed me the S.M.A.R.T of my hard drive and found it not very good, since the most important parameter Reallocated Sector Count - indicating the number of reassigned sectors (when a disk detects a read / write error, the sector is marked "reassigned", and data from the damaged sector or in other words the physical bad block is transferred to the spare area), is almost critical, it is responsible for physical defects hard drive that can no longer be repaired.

Another parameter, Current Pending Errors Count, which is responsible for the number of sectors that are difficult to read and is very different from reading a normal sector, was also marked in yellow, which indicated its poor condition. The expert's advice was this - Transfer all important data from the hard drive and "treat" it in this HDDScan program, but since there are a lot of bad blocks, most likely, all of them will not be able to be fixed and operating system it will no longer be possible to install on it, in the future you need to use this hard drive as a file storage or, as they say, a file dump, only in this way, it will live for some more time.

I listened to the master and left the hard drive in the service for "treatment" until the evening, and in the evening the result was shown to me.

Not a single bad sector (bad block), but there were 12. The number of sectors with a response time of more than 500 ms has become less (it was 90, but it became 23),

one of the critical S.M.A.R.T indicators - 197 Current Pending Errors Count-responsible, as I said, for the number of sectors, the reading of which is difficult, has become normal, the parameter 198 Uncorrectable Errors Count- the number of uncorrected errors when accessing the sector also became within the normal range, but the most important Reallocated Sector Count indicator, according to him, did not change and remained unsatisfactory, so the conclusion is this: the operating system cannot be installed on this hard disk.

And I have a question for you, explain in detail, how to check hard drive on professional suitability on my own, how to determine how many bad sectors I have and what are they? How to use programs like HDDScan, and most importantly, how to get rid of bad blocks with it. What exactly does the program do with the hard drive, ridding it of bad blocks, and for how long will such hard drive treatment help? Is it still possible to install an operating system on this hard drive or not? And the last question, the unrecoverable parameter S.M.A.R.T - Reallocated Sector Count can still be fixed and whether the physical bads are actually unrecoverable at all, on many forums on the Internet they say that there are proprietary utilities of hard drive manufacturers that can perform low-level formatting at home. Alexander Anatolievich. Tomsk.

Friends, they say brevity - sister of talent, one of my friends, after reading this question, answered it like this:- “You can’t fix a scratch with anything, but a soft bad is treated with zero.”

The topic is not simple, but relevant, the article is long, but I tried to make it understandable to a simple user. To make it easier to understand everything, I suggest that during the article, step by step check the MAXTOR STM3250310AS hard drive installed in the computer that was brought to our service for repair with the free HDDScan program. The operating system installed on the hard drive freezes from time to time, refuses to boot, giving various errors or just a black screen. The hard drive creaks and clicks, (I will explain why below). Reinstalling Windows did not help the case and the owners of the computer do not know what to do.

So how to check hard drive status? This can be done by various tests in the HDDScan program, first we will check the S.M.A.R.T indicators of this hard drive, then we will test the surface of the hard drive, we will find no less than 63 bad sectors and our program will fix them all, another question for how long (read below).

But before very short information about how a hard drive is built, if you don’t make this digression, you simply won’t understand the principle of operation of the HDDScan program and other similar programs, all the more you won’t understand what S.M.A.R.T is, as well as bad sectors (bad blocks) and why some of them cannot be fixed.

The hard disk is made of aluminum or glass plates coated with a layer of ferromagnetic material. A hard disk is primarily a device that works on the principle of magnetic recording. Magnetic heads that read, write or erase information from a hard disk hover above its surface at a height of 10-12 nm and never touch the surface of a magnetic disk, which is easily damaged.

At the final stage of hard drive production, low-level formatting, that is, tracks are applied to the working plates of the hard disk, each track is divided into sectors. Also, special magnetic servo marks are applied to the magnetic surface of the hard disk, they are needed to accurately hit the magnetic head of the hard drive on the tracks of the hard disk. The minimum unit of information on a hard disk is a sector, the amount available to the user is 512 bytes of data. Low-level formatting in the life of a hard disk occurs only once, friends, and only on special and very expensive factory equipment - called Servowriter. Information written using this formatting will never be overwritten. In any service, friends, such formatting cannot be done. Therefore, my answer to the question of whether it is possible to carry out low-level formatting using the means of the operating system will be the answer - no, it is not possible. Low-level formatting can only be done at the factory, it even destroys tracks, sectors and magnetic servos. For example, in the program, Victoria overwrites all information on the hard disk by filling all sectors with zeros, this cannot be called low-level formatting, but it cannot be called formatting either, it is something in between. After the Write mode, all sectors of the hard disk are filled with zeros and do not contain any errors, and it can be formatted in file system Windows tools.
At the factory, only service information is written to the sectors ( servo-information servo-service, for example, the physical address of the sector and the address marker that determines the beginning of the sector), this information can be called markup, it is needed for the normal operation of the hard disk, this is information about the numbers of tracks and sectors, which is necessary for the heads to correctly hit these tracks and sectors when reading information recorded in them.
After purchasing the hard drive, user data will also be written to this area later (for example, the first sector of the hard drive will contain the MBR), but user data can be written and erased, in contrast to service information, which has a much higher magnetization, which is why the read-write heads of the drive can't rub it.

All service information about track and sector numbers will be stored in a special table located in a closed and inaccessible to OS and BIOS tools service area, which is a mini-operating system, together with Firmware, they control the operation of the hard disk. Sometimes they ask the question - Do I sometimes need to update the firmware of the hard drive, the answer is no, modern hard drives do not need to be updated. This SA will also store the disk passport, SMART attribute values, as well as a defect table with information about unrecoverable or reassigned bad sectors (bad blocks).
So we got with you to the physical, logical and software bad sectors.

The fact is friends, if the operating system has problems reading data from any sector, then the hard drive controller makes several additional attempts to read the data, if they are also unsuccessful, this sector is recognized as a failure, then information is written to the normal sector , located on the backup track, and the problem sector is recognized as a failure and removed from circulation, this is called ( Remapping , in the common people remap).

Friends, whether to remap or not is decided only by the hard disk controller during operation, and not by any programs for working with the hard drive (Victoria, MHDD). These programs can only hint with their tests (for example, Advanced REMAP in the Victoria program - an improved algorithm for hiding bad blocks) to the hard drive controller that a REMAP needs to be done.

The fact that a sector is recognized as bad is entered in the defect table with information about unrecoverable or reassigned bad sectors located in the service area.

By the way, there are two defect tables, one initial P-list (Primary-list) is created after the final factory tests, any friends hard drive already has several reassigned bad blocks when it leaves the factory. Well, the growing G-list (Grown-list) table of defects is filled in as we use the hard disk.

What are bad sectors and how to fix them?

Physical bad sectors are mechanical defects in the magnetic coating of the hard disk surface (crumbling magnetic layer of working plates, chips, etc.). That is, the sector structure itself is physically faulty, such a bad block is undoubtedly subject to reassignment as a normal sector from the backup track. Very often this happens due to an impact caused, for example, by dropping a hard drive on the floor, mechanical damage magnetic coating of the hard disk, damage to the magnetic heads, the same can happen due to overheating. Vibration of the hard drive is also dangerous if it is not securely fixed. A dusty room, smoking, despite the filter installed in the hard drive, also play a huge role in the formation of bad blocks, tobacco tar and dust stick to the surface of the hard drive and interfere with reading information.
Physical bad blocks impossible fix it with no formatting, you can only reassign spare sectors from backup tracks, naturally, because of this, performance will drop somewhat, since the magnetic head of the hard drive will have to make many additional movements, looking for information on the reassigned sectors from backup tracks.

Why does the hard drive creak and clicks sometimes when working

When the operating system encounters a bad sector, the hard disk controller makes several attempts to read information from it, while clicks and creaks can be emitted by the hard drive head positioner.

The following reason may also be the cause of clicks and creaking of the hard drive. When reassigning a bad sector to a normal one from a backup track (which is not always nearby), the magnetic head naturally has to change direction, as many people say, jump from side to side.

The third reason - as I said above, in the manufacture of a hard drive, a special marking of the magnetic surface of hard drives is made with special servo marks, these servo marks serve for precise positioning of the magnetic head on the tracks of the hard drive, it is with the help of servo marks that the magnetic head of the hard drive moves correctly. Sometimes servo tags are destroyed for the same reasons that physical bad blocks are formed and the magnetic head cannot take and hold the position it needs, while clicks and creaks are heard from the hard drive.

Logic bad blocks(sector logic errors), in turn divided into correctable and incorrigible. In which case logical bad block cannot be fixed? As I said above, each sector, in addition to user information, also contains service information (servo information, for example, the physical address of the sector and the address marker that determines the beginning of the sector), in simple words marking, with the help of which the magnetic head of the hard drive gets to the desired sector tracks, such marking is applied by low-level formatting at the factory during the manufacture of the hard disk. This information it is almost impossible to remove it because it is highly magnetized, but under certain circumstances, similar to the causes of the appearance of physical bad blocks (shock, vibration, bearing play, and so on), this information is violated and it can be restored only in the factory. Yes, there are special proprietary utilities that overwrite service information, but due to the complexity of their application, this issue is difficult even for narrow specialists and we will not consider it.
Logic bad blocksthat can be corrected. When writing to the user information sector, a portion of service information is additionally recorded, the so-called ECC sector checksum (Error Correction Code), given code allows you to recover data if they were read with an error. But sometimes this code is not written, and accordingly the sum of user data in the sector does not match the ECC checksum. One of simple examples why this happens, you can cause a sudden shutdown of the computer due to power failures, because of this, information was written to the hard disk sector, but there was no checksum. The next time the operating system will access this sector and try to read data from it, but they will not match the ECC checksum, an attempt will be made to read the data again and again unsuccessfully (here you get freezes and a bad bad block).
Software bad blocks(File system errors - for example, an incorrectly marked sector belonging to two files) can be removed by means of the operating system -, more reliably, by regular formatting.

You will say that all this is good and understandable, but how to get rid of bad blocks, can you transfer data from the hard drive and format it in the operating system installer?

When formatting by all means available to the operating system, the same attempt will be made to read information from the bad sector, then compare them with the ECC checksum, but it does not match, which means that incorrect information will not be overwritten and the bad sector will remain bad even after formatting. So it turns out that a special program is needed, for example, MHDD or HDDScan, which will not read anything, but simply overwrite it forcibly, usually fill the bad sector with zeros, but then it will read what was written and compare the checksum, after which the sector will return to work.

For example, the HDDScan program has the Erase function - Test in linear recording mode (sector-by-sector erasing of data), carefully all your data will be deleted. Unfortunately, nothing will work without deleting the data, therefore, before this test, they must be transferred to another storage medium.

And the best thing is to completely remove your hard drive and connect it to another computer that has the HDDScan program, then run the Erase test and check your entire hard drive. You can not shoot anything, write down boot disks with MHDD or Victoria programs, boot from them and run these programs with the Advanced remap function, but we will do this in other articles.

Now friends go directly to work with the HDDScan program, with the help of this program, we will see the full picture of what is happening with our hard drive, namely, we will find out the S.M.A.R.T of our hard drive and decrypt it, we will also set the number of bad sectors and of course we will try to fix them.
We read the article further.

Hello admin! I read several articles about the Victoria program on your site and a question arose. But what, the latest operating system from Microsoft - Windows 10 is so flawed and does not have a built-in hard drive diagnostic tool? Can't she herself determine the state of the hard disk on which it is installed and it is necessary to download third-party programs? I have new laptop with Windows 10, and if there is such a tool, then I ask you to tell about it in your articles. Also wanted to ask. In one of your comments, you said that it is useless to run the CHKDSK built-in hard drive health utility in Windows 10 to find and fix bad sectors (bad blocks). Why? After all, on all sites like yours it is written that chkdsk, launched with the /R parameter, can fix bad blocks!

How to find out the status of a hard drive using the built-in tools in Windows 10

Hello friends! There are about a dozen articles on this topic on our site, but interestingly, I didn’t tell you about this method, but it nevertheless exists.

In fact, you can find out the status of the hard drive in Windows 10 using the built-in tools, but these tools will simply tell you: “Yes, the disk condition is good” or “The disk condition is bad”, but how bad it is and whether it is urgent to copy data from HDD and replace it, or you can still wait at least until tomorrow, that's what they won't tell you. Why?

In simple words, the operating system simply reads the hard disk self-diagnosis (S.M.A.R.T.) and if it is GOOD (good), then the system tells us so - “The disk is working fine.” If the S.M.A.R.T status of the hard drive is BAD (bad), then the system will indicate that the disk is faulty. But in life, everything is relative and very often the HDD is on the verge of failure, and Windows still shows us that the disk is working fine.

In short, if you want to make an accurate diagnosis of a hard drive, then you cannot do without special programs, and even chkdsk won't help you. I will try to prove it to you in today's article.

To find out the status of the hard drive in Windows 10 using the built-in tools, you need to go to« Control Panel»

"Center for Security and Service"

"Service"

As you can see, Windows 10 evaluates the status of the hard drive as normal: All drives are working fine. OK.

But in fact, if now run special program to diagnose hard drives, you will see that the state of the hard drive is C grade (Alarm!) And it is full of unstable sectors that the firmware of the hard drive could not fix.

The Victoria program will say the same.

How else can you find out the status of the hard drive using the built-in tools of Windows 10 or how to use the disk check utility (chkdsk). Running Check Disk from the GUI

Windows 10 has a chkdsk disk check utility and you can run it directly in GUI or by using command line. After checking, the utility will issue a complete report on the state of the file system of the operating system you have installed.

Note: You may read on many sites that the chkdsk utility, run with the /R option, can fix bad sectors (bad blocks), but in fact this is not the case. Bad sectors can be reassigned to healthy sectors from backup tracks only by the tech control firmware built into the hard drive. disk status. What the chkdsk utility does is fix NTFS or FAT32 file system errors and it is best to use the utilitychkdsk to fix file system errors, not to diagnose the hard disk condition. I'll explain a little.
You all know that the minimum unit of information on a hard disk is a sector, the amount available to the user is 512 bytes. When formatting a hard disk into a file system, all sectors are combined into clusters (one cluster is located on several sectors), respectively, the cluster is the minimum area of the file system. So here, utility chkdsk does not work with hard disk sectors, but a level higher - with clusters. In turn, Victoria and MHDD programs are used to check hard disk sectors, not clusters, so they do not treat the file system.

Enter the Computer window and right-click on the drive (C:), select "Properties"

Go to the "Service" tab and click on the "Check" button

"Check disk"

The disk is being checked for errors.

The disk has been verified successfully. No errors found.

Hello.

Forewarned is forearmed! This rule comes in very handy when working with hard drives. If you know in advance that such and such a hard drive is likely to fail, then the risk of data loss will be minimal.

Of course, no one will give a 100% guarantee, but with a high degree of probability, some programs can analyze the readings of S.M.A.R.T. (a set of software and hardware that monitors the condition of the hard drive) and draw conclusions on how long it will last.

In general, there are dozens of programs for performing such a hard disk check, but in this article I wanted to focus on some of the most visual and easy to use. So…

How to find out hard state disk

HDDlife

(By the way, in addition to HDD, it also supports SSD drives)

One of the best programs to constantly monitor the status of the hard drive. It will help to recognize the threat in time and replace the hard drive. Most of all, it captivates with its clarity: after launch and analysis, HDDlife presents a report in a very convenient form: you are shown a percentage of the "health" of the disk and its performance (the best indicator, of course, is 100%).

If your readings are above 70%, this means that your disks are in good condition. For example, after a couple of years of work (quite active by the way), the program analyzed and concluded: what given hard the disk is healthy at about 92% (which means that it should last, if there is no force majeure, at least the same amount).

After starting, the program minimizes to tray next to the clock and you can always control the status of your hard drive. If a problem is found (for example, heat disk, or there is too little space left on the hard drive), the program will notify you with a pop-up window. An example is below.

HDDLIFE notification that the hard drive is running out of space. Windows 8.1.

If the program analyzes and gives you a window as in the screenshot below, I advise you not to hesitate with the backup (and replacing the HDD).

HDDLIFE - data on the hard drive is in danger, the faster you copy it to other media - the better!

Hard Disk Sentinel

This utility can compete with HDDlife - it monitors the disk status just as well. What is most captivating in this program is its informativeness, at the same time as its simplicity for work. Those. it will be useful for both a novice user and an already experienced enough one.

After starting Hard Disk Sentinel and analyzing the system, you will see the main program window: hard drives (including external HDDs) will be presented on the left, and their status will be displayed on the right in the window.

By the way, a rather interesting function is to predict the health of the disk, according to how long it will serve you: for example, in the screenshot below, the forecast is more than 1000 days (that's about 3 years!).

The condition of the hard drive is EXCELLENT. Problematic or weak sectors were not found. No revving or data transfer errors detected.
No action needs to be taken.

By the way, the program implemented enough useful feature: you can set the threshold for the critical temperature of the hard disk, upon reaching which, Hard Disk Sentinel will notify you of the excess!

Hard Disk Sentinel: disk temperature (including the maximum for the entire time the disk was used).

Ashampoo HDD Control

An excellent utility for monitoring the status of hard drives. The monitor built into the program allows you to know in advance about the appearance of the first problems with the disk (by the way, the program can notify you about this even by e-mail).

Also, in addition to the main functions, a number of auxiliary ones are built into the program:

Disk Defragmenter;

Testing;

Cleaning the disk from garbage and temporary files (always up to date);

Deleting the history of visiting sites on the Internet (useful if you are not alone at the computer and do not want anyone to know what you are doing);

There are also built-in utilities for reducing disk noise, power settings, etc.

Screenshot of the Ashampoo HDD Control 2 window: everything is in order with the hard drive, the state is 99%, the performance is 100%, the temperature is 41 degrees. (it is desirable that the temperature be less than 40 degrees, but the program considers that everything is in order for this disk model).

By the way, the program is completely in Russian, intuitively thought out - even a novice PC user will figure it out. Pay special attention to the temperature and status indicators in the main program window. If the program generates errors or the status is rated as extremely low (+ besides, there is a rattle or noise from the HDD), I recommend that you first copy all the data to other media, and then start dealing with the disk.

Hard Drive Inspector

The salient features of this program are:

1. Minimalism and simplicity: there is nothing superfluous in the program. It gives three indicators in percentage terms: reliability, performance and absence of errors;

Hard Drive Inspector - monitoring the state of the hard drive.

CrystalDiskInfo

A simple but reliable utility for monitoring the status of hard drives. Moreover, it works even in cases where many other utilities fail, crashing with errors.

The program supports several languages, is not replete with settings, and is made in a minimalist style. At the same time, it has rather rare functions, for example, disk noise reduction, temperature control, etc.

What is also very convenient is the graphical display of the situation:

Blue color (as in the screenshot below): everything is in order;

Yellow color: alarm, action needs to be taken;

Red: urgent action needs to be taken (if you still have time);

Gray: the program was unable to determine the readings.

CrystalDiskInfo 2.7.0 - screenshot of the main program window.

HD Tune

This program will be more useful advanced users: which, in addition to graphical display of the "health" of the disk, also need high-quality tests of the disk, in which you can get acquainted with all the characteristics and parameters in detail. It should also be noted that the program, in addition to HDD, also supports newfangled SSD drives.

HD Tune offers a rather interesting feature to quickly check the disk for errors: a 500 GB disk is checked in about 2-3 minutes!

HD TUNE: quick search for disk errors. Red "squares" are not allowed on the new disk.

Also very necessary information- This is a test of the speed of reading and writing a disk.

HD Tune - check disk speed.

Well, it is impossible not to note the tab with detailed information about the HDD. This is useful when you need to know, for example, supported features, buffer/cluster size or disk rotation speed, etc.

HD Tune - detailed information about the hard drive.

In general, at least the same number of such utilities can be cited. I think that most of these will be more than enough ...

And lastly, don't forget to backups, even if the condition of the disk is rated as excellent at 100% (at least the most important and valuable data)!

Good job…

Surely, many PC and laptop users had to deal with all sorts of problems that arose with a hard drive. In this article we will try to answer the main questions regarding the operation of the hard drive and analyze specific example? what to do, when how to check the health of the carrier and whether it is worth spending your nerves and time on it.

As an example, let's take one of the most popular hard drives, which are equipped with thousands of computers and laptops - a hard drive from Seagate. The main problems of the “experimental” are the freezing of the operating system or the refusal to boot at all, various errors, creaking and clicking. So, how to check the health on the computer?

Soft

One of the most interesting (and free) programs for checking a hard drive from a technical point of view is HDDScan, which can be downloaded from the official website upon request in any search engine.

The first step is to check the S.M.A.R.T. hard drive (built-in technology that evaluates the hard drive with self-diagnostic equipment with a prediction of the remaining “life” time), and then a qualitative test of the media surface will be passed to identify bad sectors (bad blocks).

But before checking the status of the hard drive for any problems, let's take a short digression to understand the principle of the HDDScan utility, explaining in more detail what S.M.A.R.T., bad blocks are and why some of them cannot be "cured", especially since there are numerous reviews about this program are left by users who have not fully figured out what kind of blocks, tracks and sectors they are.

Principle of operation

Winchester consists of glass and aluminum plates, which are covered with a layer of technical ferromagnetic material. That is, simply put, a hard disk is a magnetic recording device. The heads, which are located on the surface of the carrier, hover at a height of 10-13 nm and never touch the surface itself, which, by the way, is very easy to damage.

The pipeline at the last stages of hard disk production carries out low-level formatting, which forms the “map” of the hard drive, dividing it into tracks and sectors. Also, special servo marks are applied, which are responsible for the exact hit of the head on the desired track of the hard disk.

Sectors

The unit of measurement of a hard drive is a sector that consists of 512 bytes of data, and in order to format the media at a low level, special and very expensive equipment is required - “Servowriter”, therefore it is performed only in the factory, and all information recorded with this equipment, will never be overwritten in any service. If someone promises to check the status of the hard drive and fulfill it, you should know that this cannot be done at home.

The manufacturer writes only service information to the sectors: the physical address of the sector itself and the address marking indicating the beginning of the track. This information is very often called the hard disk layout, and it is needed for the correct operation of the media, so that the hard drive heads accurately hit the desired sector and track for reading and writing data.

After purchasing a hard disk, the user has access to almost its entire volume, with the exception of service information, which contains the MBR (main boot record) and embedded service utilities. The disk area where this data is located has a greater magnetization, preventing the user from accidentally or deliberately deleting service information.

firmware

Data on sectors, tracks and their numbers are presented in a special table that is not available for BIOS and any OS. This table is located in the service area, which is a kind of mini-operating system and, together with the Firmware, controls all the actions of the hard drive. Some users are wondering: is it necessary to update or completely change the built-in firmware before checking the health of a hard drive on a laptop or on a regular PC? The answer is unequivocal: no. All modern media do not need any firmware update.

All information that is recorded in the service area, along with the firmware, is a disk passport: S.M.A.R.T. attributes, a table with detected defects, bad blocks that cannot be corrected, and reassigned sectors.

Sector types

Before checking external hard disk for serviceability, it is important to know that there are three types of bad sectors: physical, logical and software. When trying to read a bad sector, the operating system tries several times to load the data again, and if this fails, the OS recognizes the sector as bad and writes all the necessary information to the normal sector, which is on the backup track. Such a process is called Remapping, or in the common people Remap.

Moreover, it is up to the hard drive controller to decide whether or not to postpone the remap, and not the user or third-party software, which can only “hint” the hard drive about the need for a remap. Before checking for serviceability, the built-in utilities always check the table of defects, which includes all bad sectors that were either reassigned by the system or marked as unrecoverable.

In total, there are two tables with defects - the factory one (Primary List), which reflects the results of initial tests on the conveyor with already marked bad blocks, and the current one (Grown List), which is filled as current problems accumulate.

Bad sectors. How to fix them?

Before being serviceable, you need to know about the types of bad sectors and the possibility of their further rehabilitation in case of damage.

According to reviews, physically defective bad blocks cannot be restored by any formatting. The only thing that can be done is to reassign bad sectors with spare ones from spare tracks. A significant disadvantage of this method will be a decrease in the speed of the hard drive, since the heads will have to travel a greater distance and make additional movements to search for information on backup tracks.

Physical bad sectors are hard disk defects that are of a mechanical nature: a broken magnetic layer on the media surface, chips, scratches, etc. Very often, such problems occur after a hard drive hit, when one or more heads were damaged and, closely attaching to magnetic storage scratched its surface. Overheating or vibration, according to reviews, can also cause bad sectors. In this case, the bad block must always be replaced and reassigned with a normal sector from the backup track.

Creak and click

If before you often heard a creak or click inside system block, then the reason in most cases lies in the positioner of the hard drive head. The carrier tries to read the information over and over again, wearing out the positioner in a certain position, as a result of which a small creak occurs.

The reason for the occurrence of clicks may be the reassignment of tracks of bad sectors to backup ones. They are not always nearby, so the heads often and abruptly change their direction from side to side, resulting in specific clicks.

Another one of possible causes clicks and squeaks are a violation of the factory markings as a result of the mechanical impact described in the section above. Servo tags can be destroyed, and the head can no longer accurately hit the sector it needs, which is why repeated attempts by the carrier to read the information and get into its “rut” are heard.

According to reviews, the only panacea for squeaks and clicks available to a simple user is the built-in utilities of the operating system, which, if it does not help get rid of the problem, will at least make the hard drive work for some more time.

How to check the hard drive for good sectors?

Logical bad blocks that occur as a result of errors in the sector logic can be divided into correctable and faulty ones. Consider in which case it is impossible to fix a logical bad block.

As mentioned above, each sector of the hard disk, in addition to user data, carries part of the service information about the layout and physical addresses, defining the beginning of the sector. If this information has been damaged for various reasons (mechanical or physical impact), then it can be restored only in the factory, which is very problematic for an ordinary user.

But if, before checking the hard drive for serviceability, you did not hit or overheat it, that is, the service information in the sectors is not broken, you can restore the data and the health of the media using the checksum of each sector (ECC - error correction code). Each unit of the media contains this data, and it is this data that is used by utilities for the rehabilitation of the hard drive.

If you believe the reviews, various kinds of hard disk software errors, such as an incorrectly marked sector or track, are “treated” by conventional formatting or software built into the operating system.

Summarizing

After we figured out the principle of operation of the hard drive and outlined the points that can be fixed and which cannot, you can safely start testing the disk with the HDDScan utility and see the results, drawing the appropriate conclusions for yourself. positive feedback There is a lot of information about this software on the Internet, so you can recommend it to both novice users and experienced professionals.

After you know the current state of S.M.A.R.T., you can make a prediction - repair this drive or purchase a new one.

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