Silverbrain

Just rounding up some opinions here on hard drives and the failure of them. As a quick introduction I am a head computer technician at a computer repair shop, so I see all sorts of PC issues, and as such have all sorts of Diagnostic utilities at my disposal (memory, burn in, diagnostic etc) My question is simply, what is the best diagnostic tool for hard drive testing and / or combo of utilities?

I have been using Easy Recovery Pro 6 to diagnose the hard drives that act suspicious and it has worked well in finding drives that have bad sectors and or other issues. I also use manufacturer supplied software for further testing if needed. I physically remove the drive and put it on a known working goog system that also has all the diagnostic utilities on it. Issue as of late is that of hard drives working and then not...example being I had a customer with a 160GB Maxtor that was giving read errors within a fresh WinXP install. Run ERP, full diagnostic and the test shows up with 12+ bad sectors and halts the test at that point saying the drive fails. The drive at that point disappeared from windows completely (Disk Manager did not see it either)..For grins I shutdown, restart the PC and test and again and the test passed with no errors reported. I run Maxtors diagnostic and it locks my system about 30% through the test. I run ERP again and it shows 2 bad sectors. Maxtor test shows drive is good at that point (didnt lock system). The hard drive is out in the open, with the mean temperature of the room 60 degrees, so heat is not seemingly an issue.

Am I getting false positives? Can a drive have bad sectors once and the sectors be fine the next? Is WinXP not a good OS for the utilities? On all of the tests I never saw anything about repairing or fixing any bad spots found so I dont assume anything was physically done to the drive.

Is there a better utility to run to diagnose the drives? DriveHealth throws so many falsehoods its sick (it monitors the SMART status all the time and anticipates failure)

If you have time to read ill share another oddity of late with hard drives. IBM Desktar 40GB drive, issues steming from the drive included write fails, system locks (had pagefile.sys on it) run ibm's tool - passes. run seagate online scan, showed SMART failed on it. data was moved off it (what could be) Finally system would take 7-10 minutes to start up with the drive attached as the slave, the BIOS would say drive had failed, and sometimes wouldnt detect it at all. Once WinXP was booted, an ERP Full Diag took 9 hours but showed it passed. Full SMART test showed it passed. System would then boot quickly, w/o bios errors. another ERP took 25 minutes and showed drive was fine. Would you trust this drive with your data??

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