In alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt "Gabriel Knight"
Hi Frank I found spinrite 6 with a search but thats not the sort of program
I need as spinrite 6 recovers files from dammaged HDD's but what I need is a
test program for a HDD that tests for bad sectors and other measures across
the board (or platter) so I can find out if the drive I have is worth
installing in my pc. Thanks though.
Um ... That's exactly what Spinrite *DOES*; and far better than *ANY*
other program! It has more options of doing far deeper tests than any
other program you can find *anywhere*.
It also has the option of *FIXING* bad sectors, recovering bad sectors,
or just reporting errors.
Its one major fault is that it's a stand-alone program. Because of the
depth of the search for bad sectors and the way it does sector-checking,
it cannot run under Windows. It uses factory commands to turn on/off or
adjust retries and ECC error-recovery so that it can find (and often
recover) bad sectors; or at the least flag them as unusable. So the
usual way of running Spinrite is to have a DOS boot-disk that contains
Spinrite.
Believe me: Spinrite is *exactly* the program you're looking for.
Nothing else comes even close.
Other than that, Just run Scandisk in full mode; or if you have Norton
Utilities, run Disk Doctor (again, in full mode). Disk-Doctor is about
twice as fast; but otherwise doesn't have any better diagnostics.
Either one will do a "quick and dirty" check for errors; but to my
notion neither one is worth a damn. However, either/both are about as
good as any other program out there except Spinrite. They just do a
fast read of the disk and see if any errors are reported. (The way
drives work these days, hiding errors from the user, usually none *will*
be reported, even on a drive about to fail in two hours.) ;-{
Nope: Get Spinrite or just toss the disk.
A 20 gig drive these days is so small, it might not be worth the cost of
buying Spinrite ... Besides, the drive is old.
