Start dictation.Here is some information about hard drive testing at home.
Most computer users should not have a need to test their hard drives. But things do happen. The most common cause of hard drive failure is when you drop your machine on a cement floor. Not only does it put a dent in the case, but I can transmit fatal shock to your hard drive. If that ever happens to you, you may need to run some diagnostic software on your hard drive to make sure it's okay. Even so, a very severe blow to a hard drive may cause permanent damage that's hard to find. More information on why this happens is presented elsewhere, but the basic thing you need to know is that the hard drive is a mechanical device and that's why physical shock can cause damage to the physical parts.
There are plenty of programs out there for doing diagnostics on your hard drive. Most of the time your operating system will let you know something is wrong with your hard drive. Typically Windows does a quick check on each hard drive or partition your system to see if things appear to be logically well-organized. If something is wrong in the logical structure of the file table, Windows will issue a warning message and offered to begin a check of your hard drive or partition.
Beyond that, there are a number of free hard drive diagnostic programs that you can try if you think it's necessary. What you're looking for is maybe just a few bad spots on another rise good hard drive. If you find a few bad spots, you might decide to go ahead and use that hard drive for things that are not critical to what you're doing. For example, storage of videos that you downloaded for your entertainment could be considered a low priority items and you could use the storage space of a for that purpose.
But for your operating system you want to have a clean hard drive. Or at least a partition that is clean. In some cases it's possible to make your operating system install on the second or third partition one hard drive. It does not always have to be the first partition. That is one way you can avoid having your operating system on a partition that has a known defect.
Here is a link to a recent report on some of the free diagnostic software for hard disk drives.
Free Hard Drive Testing Programs Personally I have used some of the tools listed in the above link. It's hard for me to say that one tool is better than another. But it's good to know that you have your choice of tools. Notice that some tools can run off of a simple DOS based operating system and do not require the Windows graphical user interface. So that would give you the option of coming up with a CD that can boot a version of DOS and have the diagnostic program on it. You might need that if you find a situation where your system does not boot it all and you suspect that the hard drive is the trouble.
Attached to this post are two screenshots. The one labeled bad drive was done with a program called MiniToolŪ partition wizard.That is my favorite program presently, but it was not found in the list in the link above. The second attachment shows what a good drive will look like. That screenshot is using a program that I've never used before and it is listed in the link above.
Again, let me repeat a very important point. Windows itself does a pretty good job of finding disk problems. However, most of the problems it finds are usually logical problems and not real physical problems. This is because some rogue programs do bad things with the file allocation table or things like that and puts the wrong information in certain spots and this causes a logical error. It is not the same thing as a real physical failure of the hard drive.
Any comments welcome.
