Utility for checking disks for errors

[doctorq]

Can anyone recommend a utility to check a harddisk for bad sectos, read and write errors and anything else of importance for the health of the disk?? Something similar to scandisk on a Windows machine.

I have tried checkdisk from aminet, and it seems to do the job alright, but it's sooo slow. I reckon it will take 2 hours to check a 1 GB disk :-( I need something that's quicker and can handle drives above 4 GB.

[VooDoo]

Quarteback Tools is great for me..for OS3!!

[doctorq]

Does QB Tools support drives over 4 GB?

[lionstorm]

HDtoolbox has an option "check for bad blocks".
otherwise you could use disksalv.

[TjLaZer]

Does QB Tools support drives over 4 GB?

I doubt it since it came out before the hacks and OS 3.5+

[pyrre]

HDtoolbox has an option "check for bad blocks".

I have tried HDtoolbox.
Either it did not work at that time, or it was slooooow....
It was a 1.1 gig disk, WD caviar...
I would still like to use that disk, but i cant seem to find any tools to check for errors and remove them...

(i knocked it over while it was running)

[Phantom]

I think DiskSalv is only for floppy disks. But this way, it's the best tool for floppy disks on Amiga even now! ;-)

[meega]

I think you think wrongly... I seem to recall using DiskSalv to fix hard disks.

[Phantom]

Really? I never used it for hard disks (because in the old glory days, no hard disk was available!), but that's good to hear. Anyway, with DiskSalv I have managed to correct a lot of corrupted floppy disks.

[Piru]

@doctorq

Unfortunately amiga has no proper tool to check physical condition of a hard disk. HDToolBox does (or did, wasn't it removed for OS 3.5+?) have "check for bad blocks", but that didn't do anything on my IDE HDDs for example.

The tools listed check logical integrity of the filesystem.

[Varthall]

I have used in the past DiskSalv on my harddrive, too, and it worked well.  Unfortunately it doesn't support partitions >2GB.

Varthall

[ChuckT]

I remember Google doing a study on why Hard Drives fail and there really isn't evidence to show when a hard drive will fail:



http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/18/massive-google-hard-drive-survey-turns-up-very-interesting-thing/

One of those we thought was most intriguing was that drives often needed replacement for issues that SMART drive status polling didn't or couldn't determine, and 56% of failed drives did not raise any significant SMART flags (and that's interesting, of course, because SMART exists solely to survey hard drive health); other notable patterns showed that failure rates are indeed definitely correlated to drive manufacturer, model, and age; failure rates did not correspond to drive usage except in very young and old drives (i.e. heavy data "grinding" is not a significant factor in failure);

The average warranty these days is five years on a hard drive so you should probably replace your own hard drives or back them up respectively.

Piru wrote:
@doctorq

Unfortunately amiga has no proper tool to check physical condition of a hard disk. HDToolBox does (or did, wasn't it removed for OS 3.5+?) have "check for bad blocks", but that didn't do anything on my IDE HDDs for example.

The tools listed check logical integrity of the filesystem.

[ChuckT]

I use the PC a lot but after having so many 3 1/2 disk errors, I switched to USB thumb drives because it saved me from having to use up CD's everytime I want to back up my data.  I have some old CD's that apparently went blank and I have an external USB hard drive that I back stuff up on.

I recently saw 4GB SD cards on sale for $20 but I have enough thumb drives and I know that Micron came out with a faster memory card that will probably be used on USB3.0 and so I don't want to invest anymore money in hardware while I have a hard drive that is only used for backups.

Flash memory on a chip is more reliable than disks or hard drives because there are no moving parts and I think you can even get away leaving them in a car by accident because Flash memory is actually baked before during manufacturing before it is sold.  I saw a video on it being made at Kingston's website.  It is also more portable because you can put it in your pocket and it is like having a hard drive in your quarter pocket of your jeans.

[DoogUK]

On one tv show which i cannot recall, i witnessed a thumb drive being run over by a car several times, set fire to and finaly being put in the middle of a horrendous car crash.
Experts still retrieved 100% of tha data stored......Amazing realy.

[ChuckT]

Sandisk has a USB drive named "Titanium" because it will withstand about 2,000 pounds of weight.  I suppose it was developed for military applications but Sandisk still sold it to the public.