Failing Hard Drive?

[garrisonclark]

I have a hard drive which either has corrupted files, or it's slowly failing. I can copy some videos off it, but not others. Can someone tell me how I can get a free or low-cost way to determine which files are corrupt? I don't care whether I can recover them. I just want to at least delete the corrupted ones, copy the good ones, and reformat the drive to see what's going on....

 

[PsyKhiqZero]

have you tried error checking the drive? Right click the drive, properties and hit the tools tab.

 

[someguynamedmatt]

I'd run the free version of HDTune (http://www.hdtune.com/download.html) and let it run a full scan of your drive first - sounds exactly like what happened to my SSD; random parts of my music library were randomly starting to go bad, and so I ended up replacing the entire drive along with the files I'd lost.

To answer your actual question, though, I don't actually know of any software off the top of my head that will scan for general file corruption... I know that Windows will check its own system files with "sfc /scannow" from a command line, but those are only system files. ReCuva from Piriform (https://www.piriform.com/docs/recuva/using-recuva/recovering-files-from-damaged-or-reformatted-disks) might be able to help with finding damaged files, but you'll likely have to sort through quite a bit of other stuff it comes up with. It's definitely worth a try, though... I've used ReCuva with great success for getting files back from a HDD that lost its partitioning information once.

 

[fzabkar]

If the HDD has bad sectors, then you could clone it, sector by sector, and specify a fill pattern (eg "BAD") for any bad sectors. Then you could use a hex editor (or Windows Find Files or Folders) to search for "BADBADBAD" within a particular file or folder.