Windows diagnostic tool. Windows includes a utility called Check Disk (ChkDsk) that can be used to repair bad sectors on the hard drive. Always back up your data before running Check Disk scans on your hard drive. If a bad sector is found, data that had been available can be inaccessible once the bad sector is reallocated.
Mac Hard Drive Diagnostic and Repair Utilities We’ll cover three of the best and many popular disk space analysis tools available for the Mac, each of which is either free or offers a free demo to give a good test run with. Windows and Mac offer utilities to test and repair hard drives and Seagate provides utlities for Windows. Seagate diagnostic tool (Windows only) Download Seatools for Windows and follow the steps below to help determine the health of your device. Mac OS Diagnostics The MacOS has great tools for testing hard drives. This program is called First Aid. Always backup your data before running First Aid scans of your hard drive.
Active6 years, 11 months ago
I have a WD Elements drive that I use for Time Machine backups, I used Disk Utility to verify the disk, it found errors and I tried repairing it, which failed, so I reformatted the drive and it appears to be working for now.. However when I attempt to verify the disk again via Disk Utility, it quickly spits back a response stating that everything is fine.
I am looking for SMART testing software that thoroughly tests the drive for errors. I checked out the downloads that WD offers for this drive but they only have this sort of diagnostic tool for Windows, whereas I need one for Mac OS X Lion. Every SMART diagnostic tool I have come across states that it supports Leopard/Snow Leopard.
Can anyone help me out here? Thanks in advance.
StunnerStunner
3 Answers
Free wifi tool download. I think I'd have to agree and disagree with both of the other previous posters, more or less.
What you did was you likely had a sector go bad on your drive, so you reformatted it and during this process the bad sector got remapped to a spare sector.
Of the tools mentioned, as far as I'm concerned, Scannerz is probably the best hard drive tool on the market. It doesn't pretend to be something it isn't. It analyzes both the drive surface and mechanicals, and provides warnings that point out problems other miss. It is NOT new, it's almost 2 years old I think and I noticed it went up in price. They used to have a USB launchable version that I guess they got rid of.
I wouldn't dismiss SMART reporting and 'Smart Reporter' is, like Kurt said, a good choice. There are some SMART reporters out there that are commercial and flat out don't work. One of them actually interprets SMART data erroneously. I wouldn't be terribly alarmed if a SMART report showed some errors, but it shouldn't be misinterpreting them or reporting false errors.
A lot of the tools on the market for drives are getting really pretty old and they're outdated, and some of them appear to do nothing more than serve as interfaces to utilities that have long been on the OS. I'd say a good suite for handling problems would be:
a. Scannerz for hard drive scanning.b. SMART Reporter for SMART evaluationc. Disk Warrior for fixing indexing problems.
Disk Warrior hasn't been mentioned yet, and I don't even know if people still have indexing problems on their drives. I haven't for years, but some people swear by it.
Bob OBob O
Here's a couple tools that I've used for SMART on OSX Lion, both of which will do at a minimum SMART tests. The second is a full suite, of diagnostic and optimization tools.
- General SMART utility - Smart Reporter
- Full featured disk repair utility - Drive Genius 3
Kurt CongdonKurt Congdon
Check out Scannerz at http://www.scsc-online.com. Scannerz is a new tool that's supposed to be hardware oriented. It can not only do the regular surface scan other tools do, but it also has test procedures in the manual to help isolate problems that appear to be drive related but are in fact related to cabling or the drives control circuitry itself.
I was having problems with erratic behavior on a Firewire drive and other tools would give me a 'pass' on one test, then a 'fail' on another. The Scannerz users manual told me how to use the tool to evaluate the the system. Turned out the Firewire cable had an intermittent contact or break in it.
SMART, by the way isn't, IMHO, very good. It's erratically implemented across the board. I have an old Titanium with a 100G internal IDE drive that gets used for e-mail and light web work. The SMART software I use has been telling me that the drive is about to fail any minute..it's been telling me that for 3 years now. This is really an old klunker machine that gets used for odds and ends, so if the drive goes I don't care, but I was greatly surprised that several SMART implementations have been warning me so long about such a non-event.
Also, on Macs, SMART won't work on external drives, only internal drives. At least that's the way it is with USB and Firewire. Maybe it's different for Thunderbolt I/O. You might want to check the Wikipedia write up on SMART.
Hope that helps.
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BSD GuyBSD Guy
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A failing hard drive can mean loss or corruption to important data or to applications and system software that can further destabilize the system. If your Mac regularly slows down or crashes, or if you get odd 'permissions denied' errors about the inability to access certain files you previously had access to, then your drive may be on its way out.
Windows Disk Diagnostic Tool
The first option for testing your drive is to check its SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) status, which is a series of built-in benchmarks and thresholds that the drive regularly monitors itself. If any of these are out of place, then the drive will flag it to the system when a SMART check is performed. This can be done at any time using Disk Utility by opening the program and selecting your drive device. Then, at the bottom of the window you will see a 'SMART Status' with the results of the check. If this says anything other than 'Verified,' then you need to replace your drive.
Disk Utility is not the only option for checking the SMART status, as there are numerous third-party programs like SMART Utility (some of which are free), that may be an even more thorough SMART checker than Disk Utility.
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If the SMART status checks out, then check the disk's formatting regularly with Disk Utility. If your first check shows formatting errors, boot to the Recovery HD partition by holding Command-R at startup, and then fix the drive. Follow this by checking the drive's formatting regularly (daily), to ensure that no more errors crop up. If they do, then this indicates the drive may be failing.
Toshiba Hard Drive Diagnostic Tool Windows 10
Finally, use a third-party utility like Drive Genius or Disk Tools Pro to check the drive's media with a surface scan. This will check for bad blocks and replace them with spare blocks, if necessary. If you do find bad blocks with a scan, then again repeat this scan the following day, after using your system, and continue to do so for a few more days. If bad blocks continue to appear, then this suggests the drive will likely need to be replaced.
For external drives, unfortunately, SMART status checking is not supported; however, you can still check its formatting and perform a surface scan.
Mac Diagnostic Tools
In addition, for external drives you can troubleshoot any daisy chains and drive connections if the drive will not mount, or if it suddenly ejects, since improper daisy-chaining can lead to loss in power or data connection that can corrupt drive contents.
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