SpinRite is the best, but this can only be done offline with a bootable CD. Sorry its not your answer, but it will fix your drives


Legacy Forum Name: System Administration Scripts,
Legacy Posted By Username: phoerter

I own and use SpinRite. I'm just looking for something elsethat can be ranwithin Windows. Plus, I don't want to spend major bucks to offer this. Just seems the time Windows reports bad blocks,it's to late to save everything on the hard drive without using SpinRite or something else like it or using a backup.


Legacy Forum Name: System Administration Scripts,
Legacy Posted By Username: connectex

I did some serious digging on this subject and came up with nothing so far. I will continue seaching for a different solution than spinrite... I found several programs, but most of em blew chunks, or were generall useless.

I did find one that needed to be compiled first. I have not had enough time to go through the code, to determine if it is a faulty upload or a version incompatibility.
i.e. I cannot get it to compile properly... much less determine if it is anygood.

Gamer-X


Legacy Forum Name: System Administration Scripts,
Legacy Posted By Username: Gamer-X

Hello,

I was looking for this also. I found an interesting utility from Sourceforge (GNU) than can fit our needs. Not also look for damaged sectors but also look the general Health of the device (the soft uses SMART technology to monitor the drive).

I was trying it only for two days and not very deeply, but it looks well.

The soft is called SmartMonTools and you can find it here: http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

Good lock!

Angel.


Legacy Forum Name: System Administration Scripts,
Legacy Posted By Username: angel.amores

connectex wrote:

I own and use SpinRite. I'm just looking for something elsethat can be ranwithin Windows. Plus, I don't want to spend major bucks to offer this. Just seems the time Windows reports bad blocks,it's to late to save everything on the hard drive without using SpinRite or something else like it or using a backup.

We've also seen machines that show bad disk blocks in Windows for quite a while (and to a good degree of number/frequency) even after chkdsks without experiencing disk failure. My searches for something leading to a more accurate portrayal of impending hard disk failure have also brought me to smartctl and smartd (smartmon tools).


It's a matter of being able to grab the right information out of smartctl, but seeing as this is using SMART data, this is about as physical-level as it gets with the exception of vendor-specific tools (which obviously aren't general in nature).


Legacy Forum Name: System Administration Scripts,
Legacy Posted By Username: bgordo

We've been using smartctl and it seems to work pretty well so far. Here's the script we use if anyone's interested.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Script Name: SMART Disk Check
Script Description: This script runs smartctl.exe against 4 potential hard drives (hda-hdd) and dumps the output to a log file. That file is then parsed for the 'overall-health' line which is dumped to a final results file which is then written to the log.

IF True
THEN
Get Variable
Parameter 1 : 3
Parameter 2 :
Parameter 3 : LogDir
OS Type : 0
Execute Shell Command
Parameter 1 : NexProtectUtils\smartctl.exe -a hda >> "#LogDir#\smartout.txt"
Parameter 2 : 1
OS Type : 0
Execute Shell Command
Parameter 1 : NexProtectUtils\smartctl.exe -a hdb >>>> "#LogDir#\smartout.txt"
Parameter 2 : 1
OS Type : 0
Execute Shell Command
Parameter 1 : NexProtectUtils\smartctl.exe -a hdc >>>> "#LogDir#\smartout.txt"
Parameter 2 : 1
OS Type : 0
Execute Shell Command
Parameter 1 : NexProtectUtils\smartctl.exe -a hdd >>>> "#LogDir#\smartout.txt"
Parameter 2 : 1
OS Type : 0
Execute Shell Command
Parameter 1 : NexProtectUtils\grep -U overall-health "#LogDir#\smartout.txt" >> "#LogDir#\smartresults.txt"
Parameter 2 : 1
OS Type : 0
Get Variable
Parameter 1 : 1
Parameter 2 : #LogDir#\smartresults.txt
Parameter 3 : SmartResults
OS Type : 0
Write Script Log Entry
Parameter 1 : #SmartResults#
OS Type : 0
ELSE




Legacy Forum Name: System Administration Scripts,
Legacy Posted By Username: bds42

Do you know how well the overall health status is as an indication of impending disk failure? ie, have you seen any drives go to a "failing" status that you were able to replace before things became a big problem? I guess I don't even know the status codes and how the status is evaluated - the second machine I've been testing with fails a long test 10% of the way in due to read errors, but shows as healthy on smart status.



In some of the research we've done, people monitor the pre-fail attributes. I was thinking something among the lines of monitoring if any of the pre-fail attributes get a "WHEN_FAILED" value, indicating that they've gone below the established threshold values. I'm not sure if any of these fail, if the overall status is changed or not. The drive in question above doesn't show any attributes as failed.


Legacy Forum Name: System Administration Scripts,
Legacy Posted By Username: bgordo

I might be missing something, but isn't the software you are after called "CHKDSK /R" Locates bad sectors and recovers readable information.

Bad sectors in used and unused space will be tested and flagged in the report which ends up in the Application event log.


Legacy Forum Name: System Administration Scripts,
Legacy Posted By Username: plenfestey

I don't and won't usechkdsk /r. It will destroy the information othersoftware (i.e. SpinRite) can recover. It doesn't just report the errors without attempting to fix them. I'm talking preventative, do no harm approach.

Legacy Forum Name: System Administration Scripts,
Legacy Posted By Username: connectex

I just ran chkdsk /r on my machine and it took almost an hour to complete. We could always run that at night, maybe my machine is having some other issues. I don't know. I could live with something that took that long if it gave good clear results. "0k in bad sectors" is the best I can come up with on text to search for in the event log.

SpinRite looks ok, but I agree at $89 it's way too expensive to use as a preventative approach.


Legacy Forum Name: System Administration Scripts,
Legacy Posted By Username: bgordo

bgordo wrote:

I just ran chkdsk /r on my machine and it took almost an hour to complete. We could always run that at night, maybe my machine is having some other issues. I don't know. I could live with something that took that long if it gave good clear results. "0k in bad sectors" is the best I can come up with on text to search for in the event log.

SpinRite looks ok, but I agree at $89 it's way too expensive to use as a preventative approach.

SpinRite is a data recovery tool. It can also be used as maintenance tool, butit onlyruns checks from DOS.It willrun under Windows but onlyto make a bootable floppy or CD. It's well worth the $89 to have it in your arsenal of recovery tools. However, I've seen hard drives chkdsk /r destroyed data on and SpinRite recovered. So the main reason I started the topic was to only find sections of the hard drive that are bad, not to fix them. I'll fix them by using SpinRite or replacing the hard drive. I'm now using SmartMon Tools. However, I have yet to have it report a failed drive yet. Smartctl.exe is very fast as it only has to check the SMART counters and thresholds on the drives.

Legacy Forum Name: System Administration Scripts,
Legacy Posted By Username: connectex