Hard drive diagnostics?

[Ribbit]

Can anyone recommend a good SMART diagnostic program? (Either Windows or standalone)

The hard drive in question is a laptop drive which had 12V applied to it for several minutes (laptop drives only take 5V). I don't believe it was accessed or even spun up during this time. And no, I had nothing to do with this

Does someone in the know have an opinion about how this will affect the drive's reliability? Hopefully it'll survive long enough to get the data off it, but what about in the long term? Are SMART tools even going to be any help determining this?

[mmp121]

Most Hard drive manufacturer's have tools for their specific drive on their web site to check on a drives status. Since your drive is a laptop drive its probably a Toshiba/IBM/Fujitsu drive. Check their web site's for drive tools and the like. This of course assumes you have a floppy disc drive in the laptop since most of the mfg's tools are made to be run off floppy.

[Ribbit]

I'm fairly certain it's an IBM/Hitachi drive, but Hitachi's Diagnostics tools "do not support Travelstar E-series drives". Perhaps it's another Travelstar model, but that's why I asked about other tools.

[Dilitante1]

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com DL/burn/run there are drive utils for almost every manufacturer easy interface and has a ton of other goodies and it is FREE which works great for me

[Goc]

Great link Dil! Thanks...

[The PIT]

Seagate tools seems to work quite well when I used it.

[Ribbit]

Turns out it's a Toshiba. Looking round Toshiba's web site reveals no diagnostic tools, but I'm sure Dil's link will give me everything I need. Cheers Dil!

[Evildead666]

you can also get the relevant files from each and every manufacturer.
at work i've got the hitachi, fujitsu, seagate, western digital, maxtor utilities.
Some allow formatting at low level, and can only be done so with the manufacturers program. (or so i know).
both the maxtor and the western digital repair errors without actually mentioning it at all. but they seem to work.

You may have a component issue.
a collegue of mine applied 12V to a tactile screen controller (elo), instead of 5V, and the chip exploded . very funny at the time. ...
maybe one of the components has gone this way?

[VJ]

HDD Health

http://www.panterasoft.com/

(runs in Windows)

(I would not trust their failure prediction too much: a slight change in values read, and it can result in a huge change in prediction)


Jörg

[GT98]

From what I've run across most HDD manufactures use OnTrack's diskmanager for diagnoing hard drive problems, specificly made for their HHD. If you get Ontrack's software you should be able to diagnoise any hard drive and not worry about downloading each program off the manufactures website...which can be a pain in the ass in the field.

http://www.ontrack.com/diskmanager/

[Marshmallowman]

The program "speefan" allows you to look at various smart error counts?

[Ribbit]

Well after all that time (problems with the machine we were going to check it with) it turns out the drive is dead. It just makes clicking noises for about a minute and isn't recognised by the BIOS. My laptop refuses to boot to anything other than self-test mode if it's installed in there.

Closer inspection reveals a nasty-looking burn mark on the PCB. Oh well.

[Wombat]

Well, you've probably only blown the electronics. A new controller board, and the drive is likely just fine.

[Ribbit]

If you've got a cheap and easy way of getting another controller board, I'd love to hear it.

It's probably not worth the effort though. It was the drive out of my friend's MP3 player. (He plugged it into the wrong power supply to recharge it.) Most of what's on there can easily be reproduced, but he had a couple of original recordings which he would have liked to keep.

I think he's about to return it (the MP3 player) in the vain hope of getting a warranty replacement.