Hard disk failure is possibly the worst thing that can happen to your computer and it often occurs without giving any warning signs. The main cause of these failures are bad sectors.

A bad sector is a sector on a disk drive or flash memory that cannot be used due to permanent physical damage to the disk surface. This can happen due to improper handling, or if the disk abruptly loses power while it was in use, or if the disk is failing.

The typical symptoms of disk errors are blue screens (BSOD), slow computer, file corruptions, and other random errors. You may either run Chkdsk from the command line (see details) or launch Windows Explorer, right click the drive that you wish to examine and choose Properties. Switch to the Tools tab and click the “Check Now” button under Error checking. Select “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” to perform a thorough disk check.

If you ever had to question the integrity of your hard drive, you can also try HDDScan.

HDDScan is free utility with hard disk scanner and a complete hard drive diagnostics utility. The program can test storage device for bad sectors, show S.M.A.R.T. attributes and change some HDD parameters such as AAM, APM, etc. It can also monitor hard disk temperature and perform read/write benchmark.

HDDScan comes with a bunch of extra functionality, so if you are interested in carrying out a more indepth analysis of your hard disk like benchmarking, HDDScan should handle it all.

Key features of HDDScan.

• Supports All types of storage devices including IDE (ATA) and SATA HDD, External USB drives, RAID volumes made of ATA (IDE) / SATA / SCSI HDDs
• Provides various storage device tests: [1]Verification in linear mode – helps to determine if your drive needs data rescue, has recoverable errors or in its perfect shape. [2] Reading in linear mode – simpler, but faster disk check. [3]Erasing in linear mode. [4] Reading in Butterfly mode (synthetic random read).
• Temperature monitor for ATA/SATA/USB/FireWire/SCSI HDD
• Reading and analyzing SMART parameters from ATA/SATA/USB/FireWire HDD.
• Reports can be saved in MHT format and can be printed.
• SSD SMART and Identity reports

Download HDDScan for Free.