We receive a tremendous amount of calls asking how to tell if your hard drive is going bad. Sometimes it is very hard to tell if you need hard drive recovery by a professional because the drive will allow you access sometimes, or maybe it just seems a little slow. What we decided to do to make things easier for our customers and for technicians is to come up with a piece of software that would allow you to scan a hard drive for failures.

Here is a simple walk through of the software. If you have any questions please feel free to call us

The first thing you want to do is mount the drives. This will display a list of the hard drives PHYSICALLY connected to the machine. It will allow you to see USB drives connect to machine as well as anything connected internally to the computer.

After mounting the drives in the system you will need to select the affected hard disk and select scan. The time that this will take will depend solely on the size of the hard drive and how many errors the drive has. As a side note a drive slaved directly into the machine will have faster scan times because it will be on the actual bus.

As the drive scans you will see the timer count down, if the drive is fairly healthy this should be an accurate count.

The “Bad Block List” box is where you will see errors report if there is any. It will also tell you its relationship to the data on the hard drive.

Once the scan is done you can then click on the the “report” button and it will print out a hard copy of the report. You can use this report for your customers so they can see why they drive needs hard drive recovery or why they would need to buy a new hard drive.