Freeware Hard Disc Diagnostics?

[mceng]

Does anybody know of any decent (or even half-decent) DOS based Hard Disc diagnostics programs? Can't be scandisk coz it needs to be used on NTFS & Linux as well as FAT16/32

 

[sniffer]

Most hard disk manufactures have various OS diagnostic and benchmark freeware applications available for download from their respective web sites.
Examples;
<A HREF="http://www.storage.ibm.com/techsup/hddtech/hddtech.htm" target="_new">IBM</A>
and
<A HREF="http://www.maxtor.com/Maxtorhome.htm?http&&&www.maxtor.com/products/" target="_new">Maxtor</A>

and other good places to look;
<A HREF="http://www6.tomshardware.com/site/links.html" target="_new">THW Links</A>
and
<A HREF="http://www.tweakfiles.com/" target="_new">TweakFiles.com</A>


<A HREF="http://www.beerology.com/ars/viewresults.cfm?ArsID=Sniffer" target="_new"><i><font color=blue>=Sniffer=</font color=blue></i></A>

 

[mceng]

Ok, thanks for the links, I'll check em out

 

[Guest]

That was sound advice by Sniffer. To my knowledge all major hard drive manufactorers have their own diagnostic tools downloadable from their respective websites except the dreaded Fujitsu.

I think Maxtor even requires that you use theirs before you can return a drive back under warranty.

 

[bibo]

I must say that I have not followed the previous links, so I hope I'm not repeating things, but there is a very interesting utility called SMART Disk Monitor. You can find it at: http://www.santools.com/smartmon.html

It works with all kinds of disks and in its demo version has just a few less important things disabled. Typical attributes that are monitored include head flying height, temperature, spin-up time, retries, and internal error logs. It is worth to take a look at it, I assure you.

Bibo