I’m having strange intermittent problems with my hard drive. It seems that large files written to it sometimes become corrupt, but smaller files seem to be fine. I’ve eliminated a few possible causes (overclocked CPU and a non-standard IDE cable) but now I’m not sure how to check if I fixed it. Are there any utilities that write large files to hard drives and check their integrity? Preferably shareware or freeware. I could just play around with Photoshop or something, but I’d prefer a more thorough test. The Windows Scandisk didn’t find any problems even before my fix, so that’s useless.
You can typically download a drive setup utility applet from most drive manufacturers websites that are drive specific and will give the drive a workout and test for errors.
Nortons Utilities Norton Disk Doctor also has some drive testing modes available.
If you really want to make the drive cry uncle see if you can DL the PC Magazine test suite just prior to the current one. The latest one is only on CD now. http://www.zdnet.com
You might also want to check your RAM memory (swap in - swap out) as a corrupted cache will potentially generate damaged files.
Gateway also has a utility to tests HDD on their website
http://www.gateway.com/support/product/drivers/hdd/index.shtml
GWSCAN is the program…you can run it in dos and test the HDD
Thanks guys. I found the utility on the manufacurer (IBM) web page. It doesn’t find any errors now. In hindsight, I should have found a utility that recognizes the problem before I tried to fix it. Now I don’t know if it really is fixed… Oh well.
I couldn’t find the PC Magazine test suite. Do you mean the benchmark program or is that separate? I’ve looked at the WinBench docs but it doesn’t say if it looks for disk errors.
You can also try SpinRite by Gibson Research. It costs money, and can be found at:
Good luck.