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HDD Health

Wuz
Rising Star
Posts: 141
Fixes: 1
Registered: ‎30-07-2007

HDD Health

Dear all,
I had problems with crashes and connecting to the net. I eventually (two weeks ago) ran Chkdsk and it corrected a lot of errors bad sectors etc. Everything has gone well since then.
I read an answer to a Hard disk problem which inspired me to run HDD health which has reported the health as 1% and critical!!
It is an 80gb Samsung SP0812C
I have ordered an external hard drive which should arrive next week but just want to know how reliable the HDD Health system is at predicting failure?
As the world didn't end yesterday I ordered a Western Digital external drive but did not pay for next day delivery. Was I foolish to expect it to last a week or so to save a few quid on delivery?
My first 1 gb hard drive is still running after over 11 years and I have only had one failure in that time and that one just made a horrible noise and stopped dead!
Wuzwine
2 REPLIES 2
samuria
Grafter
Posts: 1,581
Thanks: 3
Registered: ‎13-04-2007

Re: HDD Health

A hard drive has some extra space on it or engineering sectors when a bad sector happens it seamlessly maps the bad sector to these spare ones and you never notice it. If they are full then it will show the rest as faulty so your hard drive now has faults.
The drive its self may be perfect it depends who or what has written to the drive and said there are bad bits. If its the bios of the drive then it will be a fault but if windows does it it may not actually be faulty but will show up as if it is has sectors are marked as bad by windows and the drive doesnt check.
You can get software that does a low level format which may find the bad sectors are ok and return them to use making the drive good as new ish. The main one which has been out for years is Spinrite from http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm
I have used it for over 18 years and it works magic and you dont loose any data.
If you can backup and then do it there is a free tool from http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/HDD-Low-Level-Format-Tool.shtml
which will do the same thing but it will erase the disk in order to make it new.
In the good old days you had to low level format hard drives by going into debug and typing g800 then you had to partition the drive and high level format
Wuz
Rising Star
Posts: 141
Fixes: 1
Registered: ‎30-07-2007

Re: HDD Health

Thanks Samuria,
I will instal that on Monday which I have set aside for the delivery of my external drive and maintenance. At the moment my stuff is backed up on CDs, floppies and last time I had to use the backups a couple of old non HD floppies baffled me for a while!! Nearly threw a couple of them away until I noticed that they weren't 1.44. Kept one for old times sake.
Now where is it?
Thanks again
Wuz