Is there a better disk-maintenance utility than Chkdsk out there?

[Borgholio]

This is a re-post of something I asked over in Help and Support. I didn't
get any useful answers over there, so hopefully this will be a better
place. Thanks in advance!

I know that Chkdsk /r is supposed to locate and repair bad sectors, but I
have discovered that it only does so on the parts of the hard drive that
contain data. I have a few old crappy hard drives with known bad sectors
on them that I used for this test. Using an IDE to USB adapter, I
formatted the drives as fat32 and ran Chkdsk on my XP machine...no errors.
I moved the drives to a Windows 98 machine and ran Scandisk...bingo, it
found bad sectors.

Next, I re-formatted the drives and put them back on my XP machine. As
before, Chkdsk did not find any bad sectors. However after I copied test
data to the drive, Chkdsk found the same number of errors that Win98's
Scandisk did. Obviously, Chkdsk does not find bad sectors on a drive
unless data has already been written there...which in my opinion is kinda
stupid. :-/

Long story short, is there another disk diagnostic program I can use that
properly scans an entire disk, just like Win98's old Scandisk program used
to? Another thread mentioned SpinRite. Would that do a better job than
Chkdsk for locating bad sectors over the entire disk (even in unused space)?

 

[Pavel A.]

This is a re-post of something I asked over in Help and Support. I didn't
get any useful answers over there, so hopefully this will be a better
place. Thanks in advance!

I know that Chkdsk /r is supposed to locate and repair bad sectors, but I
have discovered that it only does so on the parts of the hard drive that
contain data. I have a few old crappy hard drives with known bad sectors
on them that I used for this test. Using an IDE to USB adapter, I
formatted the drives as fat32 and ran Chkdsk on my XP machine...no errors.
I moved the drives to a Windows 98 machine and ran Scandisk...bingo, it
found bad sectors.

Next, I re-formatted the drives and put them back on my XP machine. As
before, Chkdsk did not find any bad sectors. However after I copied test
data to the drive, Chkdsk found the same number of errors that Win98's
Scandisk did. Obviously, Chkdsk does not find bad sectors on a drive
unless data has already been written there...which in my opinion is kinda
stupid. :-/

Long story short, is there another disk diagnostic program I can use that
properly scans an entire disk, just like Win98's old Scandisk program used
to? Another thread mentioned SpinRite. Would that do a better job than
Chkdsk for locating bad sectors over the entire disk (even in unused
space)?

Yoo may want to check with the maker of your HD.
Each of them has their diag tools.
Note that USB adapter can hide or distort test results,
direct connection is better.

SpinRite is worth to try from two reasons - a. It runs on pure DOS,
closer to the metal. b It is independent from
the disk vendors. Please visit grc.com for the first hand info.

Regards,
--PA

 

[VanguardLH]

Long story short, is there another disk diagnostic program I can use
that properly scans an entire disk, just like Win98's old Scandisk
program used to? Another thread mentioned SpinRite. Would that do
a better job than Chkdsk for locating bad sectors over the entire
disk (even in unused space)?

Nothing better than SpinRite. Testing if far more thorough than any
freebie utility slapped into any version of Windows.

 

[philo]

Yoo may want to check with the maker of your HD.
Each of them has their diag tools.
Note that USB adapter can hide or distort test results,
direct connection is better.

SpinRite is worth to try from two reasons - a. It runs on pure DOS,
closer to the metal. b It is independent from
the disk vendors. Please visit grc.com for the first hand info.

Though I have no doubt that Spinrite is a good utility...
For the price of it, you can just go out and buy a new HD.

Spinrite would probably be most useful for a. refurbisher who works on large
quantities of older machines

 

[Michael W. Ryder]

Though I have no doubt that Spinrite is a good utility...
For the price of it, you can just go out and buy a new HD.

I have used Spinrite since it first came out and have found that it is
very useful not only for diagnosing drive problems but in saving data on
a "bad" drive. The last time I used it Ghost would not copy a failing
drive because of errors on the drive. I used Spinrite to repair the
errors and Ghost worked fine for copying the entire drive. I didn't
lose any data or have to spend weeks reinstalling all the programs and
updates. The nominal cost of Spinrite has always been far less than the
value of the program.
I have used it many times for testing a drive to see if problems are
drive related. In one case I found that the electronics were failing as
the lengthy testing caused them to heat up enough to start failing. I
would not have seen this problem with a quick scan of the drive.

 

[Borgholio]

I have used Spinrite since it first came out and have found that it is
very useful not only for diagnosing drive problems but in saving data on
a "bad" drive. The last time I used it Ghost would not copy a failing
drive because of errors on the drive. I used Spinrite to repair the
errors and Ghost worked fine for copying the entire drive. I didn't
lose any data or have to spend weeks reinstalling all the programs and
updates. The nominal cost of Spinrite has always been far less than the
value of the program.
I have used it many times for testing a drive to see if problems are
drive related. In one case I found that the electronics were failing as
the lengthy testing caused them to heat up enough to start failing. I
would not have seen this problem with a quick scan of the drive.

Thanks a bunch for the replies. It seems Spinrite is the way to go.

 

[philo]

I have used Spinrite since it first came out and have found that it is
very useful not only for diagnosing drive problems but in saving data on
a "bad" drive. The last time I used it Ghost would not copy a failing
drive because of errors on the drive. I used Spinrite to repair the
errors and Ghost worked fine for copying the entire drive. I didn't
lose any data or have to spend weeks reinstalling all the programs and
updates. The nominal cost of Spinrite has always been far less than the
value of the program.
I have used it many times for testing a drive to see if problems are
drive related. In one case I found that the electronics were failing as
the lengthy testing caused them to heat up enough to start failing. I
would not have seen this problem with a quick scan of the drive.

Well, If it can do that, then it's probably well worth it.

I'll have to give it a try next time I need to recover data from a drive
that's developed a read/write error