Your computer’s hard drive holds all the important data and losing it to a hard disk failure can be distressing. Hard disks; unfortunately, have a limited lifespan and it will get damaged or corrupted sooner or later. In this article, you’ll know some of the possible causes and different free tools to check your hard drive for failure or errors so that you can appropriate measures before it’s too late.
Problems You Might Encounter
- Computer is extremely slow
- Windows OS unable to boot
- Computer reboot or some random errors
- Errors while copying, reading, deleting, or moving data on the PC.
The Solutions
Below are the some of the tools that can be used to test your PC’s hard drive for failures and errors.
Scandisk
Scandisk is an inbuilt Windows tool that scans the drive for bad sectors or system errors and reports if there are any issues with your hard disk. It performs both scanning and fixing the issues, it can and also reports the bigger issues that it cannot repair. So, you can use this utility to check hard disk health and also fix bad sectors and other errors if any.
To run Scandisk, right click the drive which you want to check for errors, and choose “Properties” from the context menu. Next, click Tools tab and then click Check button.
A window will pop up with two options – to fix file system errors and scan for bad sectors. Choose either one or both the options if you want to repair the errors and bad sectors and click Start button.
This is a very basic tool which concentrates on finding bad sectors and system errors. It just lets you know if there are any major issues and nothing more. Thus, you can use this as a basic hard drive checking and repair utility.
CHKDSK
Another Windows inbuilt utility, Command Prompt Check Disk. To launch chkdsk on Windows 10, type cmd in the search box, and right click Command Prompt from the search results and select Run as administrator.
In the Command Prompt windows, type chkdsk X:/f and hit Enter. Replace X with the actual drive letter, which you want to check.
WMIC
This is another command line interface, which allows you to perform numerous administrative tasks which include checking hard drives for error. It uses S.M.A.R.T feature (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) of the hard disk to check the status and give a simple decision like Pred Fail or OK, etc.
To check the health of the hard disk in WMIC, go to Command Prompt by following above-mentioned steps and type wmic and press Enter.
Now, type disk drive get status and press Enter again. After some time, you’ll see the status of the hard disk.
Seagate SeaTools
This is a free and open source tool, used to check the hard drive for failures and errors.
Replacing The Hard Disk
If your hard disk is producing SMART errors or turning bad even after performing the above-mentioned health check-ups, it is better to replace the hard drive. If you are worried about the retrieving the lost data, use a Windows Hard Drive Recovery Tool which recovers data without formatting the drive and without altering the content. The tool even creates the disk image from which you can recover the data at a later time.
