Recover the hard drive using special programs. They allow you to test the hard drive, as well as fix minor malfunctions. Often, this is quite enough to continue fruitful work. From the article you will learn about one of them called Victoria.
What is the utility capable of?
Checking the Victoria HDD is completely free. Also, the program has many functions and is designed not only for professionals, but also for inexperienced users. So, now you will learn how to check the hard drive with Victoria.
Modes
In its work, the utility can use the standard Windows toolkit (API) or work in standalone mode through ports. Offline mode provides more reliable data, features additional recovery tools, and allows you to test not only internal but also external drives.
What is the use of the utility?
The Victoria program allows you to:
- speed up your computer;
- ensure the stability of both programs and the operating system itself.
This allows such features:
- repair of faulty sections of the hard disk;
- replacement of bad sectors with spare ones;
- overwriting bad sectors.
Is it necessary to use Victoria?
Experienced users will note that it is possible to fix bad sectors of the drive by replacing them with backup ones using the means of the OS itself (operating system). Correct, but for this you need to check the volume of the hard disk. However, this method has some drawbacks, for example, working with the active partition occurs exclusively in DOS mode, there is no detailed information, and there is no possibility to choose a method for treating a malfunction. Therefore, it is better to perform hard disk recovery using victoria hdd, which is devoid of these shortcomings.
Working with the program
If you decide to use the program in question, it is best to look for the most recent version. After all, it has already corrected the errors that were in the previous ones. You do not need to install the utility. It is distributed in archival form. Unzip the resulting archive and go inside. There you will find only one executable file vcr447.exe. To make it easier to use, make a shortcut to it on the screen.
If your PC is running Windows 7 or higher, then you need to run the file only as an administrator. By right-clicking on the shortcut, select the entry "Run as administrator" in the context menu and click on it.
Before opening the Victoria program window, several pop-up windows will appear in front of you in turn:
- unknown error.
- Invalid handle.
- PortTalk driver not installed.
This warns specialists that there is not yet a driver in the system to work with ports. Click OK and that's it.
Getting Started
The graphical interface of the utility opens on the Standard tab. In its right part, specify the disk to be scanned. Even if it is the only one, it is still necessary to point to it. Then his data will appear on the left.
Important! It is strictly forbidden to enter any passwords. This option is for professionals only. Next, go to the Smart tab and on the right side click on Get Smart. The table will display 242 parameters of your hard disk.
The system removes this data from the disk immediately after installing it on the PC, and Victoria takes it from the system. You can review them, but pay the most attention to the fifth item, the Health column. It contains the information for which you launched the utility. What does the color of these circles mean?
- green - HDD sectors feel great;
- yellow - there are problems;
- red - parameter values are invalid.
The Raw column shows how many bad sectors of the disk were found.
Test tab
Move to the Test tab. The scanning process is based on measuring the length of time elapsed from sending a request to returning a response from each of the sectors of the drive. When scanning a disk, the utility evaluates the sectors being scanned and sorts them by color and state (to the left of the color of the sectors, the maximum allowable response time in milliseconds is indicated):
- three gray - fine;
- green - not bad;
- orange - satisfactory;
- blue or red - bad.
Actions, according to the selected modes, will be applied to the HDD sectors that you mark.
Operating modes
The utility has four modes of operation:
- Ignore - check without trying to treat bad sectors;
- Remap - replacement of bad sectors with spare ones;
- Restore - an attempt to restore bad sectors programmatically;
- Erase - remove bad blocks from disk memory using low-level formatting. You can’t just try the mode, as there is a possibility of damage to areas that can still work in the future. The first three will suffice.
Reserve sectors, what is it?
The operating system separates a spare area on the hard disk. Most often, it is the slowest of all and is located closer to the center of the HDD. Its size is approximately equal to 10% of the total volume. When bad sectors appear, the OS moves data from them to this spare area. True, she does not do this herself, but during the launch of disk checks for errors using Windows tools or using external programs.
Diagnostics
If you have already selected the mode and marked the sectors for treatment, then press Start.
Attention! If after clicking on Start the diagnostics did not start, then most likely you did not mark your drive on the Standard tab with the mouse. You need to go back, do this, and run the test again.
The testing process can be observed on the screen. In earlier versions of Victoria, the tested sectors were displayed in a grid.
However, such a graphical display gave a significant load on the processor with large volumes of hard drives. As a result, in the latest version 4.47, the developers have replaced the grid with a graph that appears within a few minutes after the start of the scan.
Visualization is disabled if the Grid checkbox is unchecked.
Meaning of buttons
After starting the test, the name of the Start button changes to Stop, which allows you to stop the process by pressing it.
If you press the Pause button, it will change its name to Continue, scanning will pause. Click on it and everything will continue from where it left off.
Attention! Terminate all programs that may access the hard drive being checked. If they are not removed from memory, then the readings will lose accuracy, and the number of orange sectors will increase significantly. This will happen due to the fact that some of them will use open source programs.
Will the life of the hard drive last, thanks to Victoria?
You can programmatically cure up to 10% of bad sectors, as well as restore the operation of any of the sectors on the active volume if this was the result of system failures. Victoria does not fix physical damage.
However, if the bad sectors are restored, and the remaining ones are moved to the spare area, then the disk will still serve. True, it is better not to use it to install the system, but only as an additional one.
The victoria hdd utility was created to solve problems and test various types of hard drives with the ability to apply different parameters. The software has advanced functionality that allows you to solve various problems with hard drives that arise under the circumstances.
Utility Features
This utility can be downloaded from 
Download the archive, unpack it and run the executable file vcr446f.exe
The utility interface opens. 
This free software is endowed with a logical and simple interface, where there are various additional software modules for examining hard drives. Even an ordinary inexperienced user will be able to understand the program, because all the points are written in an understandable language, and even at the first start you can understand the basic and most important functions.
The victoria hdd utility (Victoria) will help the user perform a thorough check of the hard drive, as a result, information about the state of the hard drive will be provided. In addition, you can carry out self-diagnosis in the "S.M.A.R.T." which allows you to determine the period of disk health.
Victoria hdd software has the function of checking the surface of the hdd disk for possible damage and other problems. The utility can perform a full check of the hard drive for defective sectors, after the analysis, information about the state of the media as a whole is provided. If victoria hdd finds bad sectors, they will be reassigned so that the drive can be used in the future without losing data.
The Victoria disk utility can be used by both professional repairmen and ordinary users. Depending on the skill and skills, the user can configure the victoria hdd software to suit their needs, which will change the hard drive analysis algorithm.
What is included in the functionality of the Victoria utility:
The utility is able to give a detailed report on the operation of the hard drive and its technical characteristics;
Allows you to determine the connected media via sata / ide channel;
Has the ability to detect flaws on the surface of the hard drive;
Able to eliminate the shortcomings of the hard drive caused during operation, such as encryption of a broken sector and others;
Equipped with a practical and comfortable smart-monitor that clearly shows the important vital signs of the disc;
It has an integrated explorer for working with the file system;
Detailed help system for using and configuring the victoria hdd utility;
The Victoria utility is absolutely free;
The victoria hdd utility is designed to perform various tests of hard drives, it is more suitable for people with an above-average level of computer use. If you are running the victoria hdd utility for the first time, it is best not to change the preset settings unless you have an idea of their purpose.
In general, the Victoria utility is very useful and relevant in tracking down hard drive problems and successfully repairing most breakdowns. This software has already been able to restore more than one practically “dead” hard drive, and if you are faced with a hard drive-related problem, the victoria hdd utility will come in handy.
Checking the hard drive
We open the program, and on the "Standart" tab we see the disk passport, which is listed on the right. 
Go to the "Tests" tab. Select the check mode "Ignore" (Ignore). In this mode, the program will make requests to the sectors of the hard drive, and if they are faulty or faulty, then it will skip them. 
Good afternoon.
In today's article I want to touch on the heart of a computer - a hard drive (by the way, many people call the processor the heart, but I personally don’t think so. If the processor burns out, buy a new one and there are no problems; if the hard drive burns out, then information in 99% of cases cannot be restored).
When do you need to check the hard drive for health and bad sectors? This is done, firstly, when they buy a new hard drive, and secondly, when the computer is unstable: you have strange noises (); when accessing a file - the computer freezes; long copying of information from one hard disk partition to another; missing files and folders, etc.
In this article, I would like to tell in a simple language how to check a hard drive for bads, to assess its performance in the future, and to sort out typical user questions along the way.
So, let's begin…
Updated on 12/07/2015. Not so long ago, an article appeared on the blog about the recovery of bad sectors (treatment of bad blocks) with the HDAT2 program - (I think the link will be relevant for this article). Its main difference from MHDD and Victoria is the support for almost any disk with interfaces: ATA/ATAPI/SATA, SSD, SCSI and USB.
1. What do we need?
Before proceeding with the testing operation, in cases where the hard drive is not stable, I recommend copying all important files from the disk to other media: flash drives, external HDDs, etc. ().
1) You need a special program for testing and restoring the hard drive. There are a lot of similar programs, I recommend using one of the most popular - Victoria. Below are the download links
2) Next, a multi-colored program window will appear in front of us: go to the “Standard” tab. The upper right side shows the hard drives and CD-Roms that are installed in the system. Choose your hard drive you want to test. Then press the "Passport" button. If everything goes well, then you will see how your hard drive model is determined. See picture below.
If the hard disk controller is operating in AHCI (Native SATA) mode, SMART attributes may not be obtained, with the message “Get S.M.A.R.T. command… Error reading S.M.A.R.T!”. The inability to receive SMART data is also indicated by the “Non ATA” highlighted in red during the initialization of the media, the controller of which does not allow the use of ATA interface commands, including the request for SMART attributes.
In this case, you need to go to BIOS and in the tab Config->>Serial ATA (SATA)->>SATA Controller Mode Option->>change from AHCI to Compatibility. After finishing testing with Victoria, change the setting to the way it was before.
You can read more about how to change ACHI to IDE (Compatibility) in my other article:
4) Now go to the "Test" tab and press the "Start" button. In the main window, on the left, rectangles painted in different colors will start to appear. It is best if they are all grey.
You need to focus your attention on the red and blue rectangles (the so-called bad sectors, about them at the very bottom). It is especially bad if there are a lot of blue rectangles on the disk, in this case it is recommended to check the disk again, only with the “Remap” checkbox enabled. In this case, the Victoria program will hide the found bad sectors. In this way, hard drives are restored that have begun to behave unstably.
By the way, after such a recovery, the hard drive will not always work for a long time. If he has already begun to “crumble”, then hope for a program - personally, I would not. With a large number of blue and red rectangles, it's time to think about a new hard drive. By the way, on a new hard drive, blue blocks are not allowed at all! experienced users call bad sectors (meaning bad, not readable). Such unreadable sectors can occur both during the manufacture of a hard disk and during its operation. All the same, the hard drive is a mechanical device.
During operation, the magnetic disks in the hard drive case rotate rapidly, and the reading heads move above them. If the device is bumped, struck, or a software error occurs, it may happen that the heads hit or fall to the surface. Thus, almost certainly, a bad sector will appear.
In general, this is not scary, and many disks have such sectors. The disk file system is able to isolate such sectors from file copy/read operations. Over time, the number of bad sectors may increase. But, as a rule, the hard drive often becomes unusable for other reasons before the bad sectors “kill” it. Also, bad sectors can be isolated using special programs, one of which we used in this article. After such a procedure - usually, the hard drive starts to work more stable and better, however, it is not known how long this stability will last ...
Best…
Oddly enough, but sometimes the "fall" of the operating system really occurs without user intervention. The fact is that such a deplorable outcome is greatly facilitated by the incredible recording density on modern hard drives, as well as the complexity of modern SATA interfaces. Even a backup copy of the system does not always save.
Introduction to the topic
The reason is damage to sectors Such zones among professional "computers" are called "Bad sector" or "Bad block" (from the English word Bad, that is, bad). The trouble is that the presence of such zones very often makes it completely impossible not only to restore the OS, but even to cleanly install it with formatting the media. In this case, you will have to remap "broken" sectors to "recover" them.
It is no coincidence that we took the word "Restoration" in quotation marks. The fact is that Remap is the replacement of a bad sector with a similar block from the reserve, which is always available on all hard drives. As a rule, all this is done by system tools in a fully automatic mode, but for a number of reasons, some hard drives do not support this feature (automatic replacement).
Special programs
This is where specialized utilities become necessary. One of the best and most revered of them is considered "Victoria". This wonderful program saved hard drives back in the dense days of DOS, and even now many experts prefer to run it in this mode. Today we will learn how to use Victoria.
Beginning of work
First of all, you need to make a bootable flash drive. Of course, traditionally the utility is launched from a floppy disk, and for this the manufacturer even offers, but today it is almost impossible to find a floppy disk drive on home users' computers.
Tips for writing a boot image to a flash drive are available on the official website of the program, so we will not dwell on this.
Booting from the media (after setting the desired boot option in the BIOS), you can see the classic test inherited from its distant ancestors from the DOS times. We continue to learn how to use the Victoria program.
Important Aspects
By default, you will be prompted to download Victoria Russian for Desktop. This version is the first in the boot line, designed for desktop computers. If you have a laptop, then you should select the item: ... for Notebook, and then press the Enter key.
Determine the interface for connecting a disk
In the first window, be sure to press the F2 key to automatically detect the type of hard disk interface. If the program failed to do this automatically, you will have to do it manually. To do this, press the P (English) key, after which a window with a list of interfaces will appear. Select the one you want using the arrow keys, then press Enter.
In general, the Victoria program in Russian was released relatively recently, so it’s better to remember the English terms right away, since in older versions they are found everywhere.
Attention!
If you have an old hard drive with an IDE interface, you should be extremely careful about the last step. In particular, if you do not know the difference between Primary Master and Secondary Slave, it is better to close the program, since all your subsequent actions can lead to irreversible consequences, up to damage to the hard drive itself.
So, how to use Victoria?
Getting Started
Once you have selected the correct one and pressed Enter, a message will appear at the bottom of the program window indicating the successful completion of the presets. After that, you need to press the F2 button on the keyboard. You will immediately see the passport of the selected hard drive.
To start scanning the disk surface, press the F4 button. The HDD-scan menu appears. In it, you should set the parameters that the program will be guided by when scanning the hard drive.
By default, it is proposed to scan the entire disk surface (Start and End positions). If desired, you can change the value (in bytes) to the amount that you want to check. In addition, you should select the option "Linear reading", Ignore Bad Blocks and Change end of test. Charting can also be disabled, especially since it is recommended by the developers of Victoria HDD: many users know how to use the program itself, but deciphering such information is not for amateurs.
Note!
However, in most cases, the active system partition is located at the very "beginning" of the disk, so in some cases it is quite acceptable (in order to reduce the scan time) to specify a smaller amount of disk space to be scanned.
By the way, this value can be specified not only in bytes, but also as a percentage, which can greatly facilitate the diagnostic procedure. In addition, in the latest versions of the program, it is possible to set the volume in gigabytes. But! Due to software limitations, you cannot exceed the one terabyte limit.
Before using the Victoria program, we would recommend once again to recall the risks posed by careless handling of hard disk partitions. Don't forget about it!
About Reading Views
In addition to “Linear”, you can set the “Random” mode and apply the “Butterfly” option. The last two methods can provide much more reliable test results, but we strongly discourage their use unless absolutely necessary. Firstly, the test time itself increases by about 10 (!) times. Secondly, and much worse, these techniques dramatically increase the rate of wear of the mechanical part of the spindle disk. An old hard drive from such "executions" can simply fail.
Since you have to work with the Victoria program in order to extend the life of the drive, this outcome is very sad ...
No room for error
With the line Ignore Bad Blocks selected, press the spacebar, changing the value to BB = Advanced REMAP. If you carefully read the introductory part, you already know the meaning of this term. But! If you press the "Space" again, the option BB = Erase 256 sect will be set. This mode erases (!) data from the hard drive! It is extremely useful when preparing a hard drive for sale, but it can play a very cruel joke with an inexperienced user ... We warn you again: before using Victoria, check everything again!
All! After pressing the Enter key, the one for which everything was started will begin. The number of found bad sectors of the hard disk will be displayed in the lower right part of the working window. If any are found, they will be automatically replaced with spare sectors (“Remap”).
To exit the program when finished, click on X (X). Here's how to use Victoria.
Purpose of the programThe Victoria program is designed to test various drives: HDD, flash, RAID arrays, and also allows you to hide HDD surface defects, if such a possibility is available. The author of the program is Sergey Kazansky, distributed free of charge, you can download http://hdd-911.com/
Brief description of the program
On Vista and older systems, the program must be run as Administrator even if your account has administrator rights.
The program window is divided into several tabs: Standard, SMART, Test, Advanced and Setup. The API and PIO switches change the mode of operation of the program with the disk being tested. PIO mode requires support from the motherboard chipset. Modern systems younger than about 2011 do not support this mode of operation of the program, so we will not describe it. Let's give a brief description of the control elements in the tabs.
Standard. The window on the right shows a list of drives installed in the system. These are not only hard drives, but also USB flash drives, SD, CF and other memory card readers. They can be tested too. The device for testing is selected by clicking on the desired item. Immediately to the left in the Drive ATA passport window, information about the selected device is displayed. Seek, Acoustic menegment & BAD "er runs the seek test, allows you to manage AAM (if supported by the disk) and simulate bad sectors on the disk.
S.M.A.R.T. When you press the Get SMART button, SMART is read. USB drives are not supported. The rest of the SMART ON, SMART OFF, Auto save attributes ON/OFF buttons enable/disable SMART monitoring and save read attributes.
test. The main tab with which we will work in the future. The Start LBA/End LBA windows define the beginning and end of the region under test. By default, the entire disk is tested. Pause - pauses the test, the value changes to Continue. Start - start the selected test, change the value to Stop - stop the test. Rhombus with green arrows - moving forward or backward on the surface of the disk. Block size - the size of the block of sectors read at a time, you can leave it alone. Timeout - the time after which, in the absence of a response from the drive, the program will transfer to the next sector. End of test - what to do at the end of the test: stop the disk, start the test again, turn off the disk or turn off the computer. The color bar shows the number of blocks with the specified read time. Verify, Read, Write switches - test selection. Verify - check: the disk reads the sector, but does not transfer its contents to the computer. Read - Reads a sector into the computer. Write - erases a sector - this test destroys user data. Switches Ignor, Remap, Restore, Erase - the mode of working with bad blocks. Ignore - skip. Remap - attempt to remap a sector from a reserve. Restore - try to read data and write back (does not work on modern disks > 80GB). Erase - an attempt to write to a bad sector. It can fix it if an incorrect checksum (CRC) is written to the sector. > - execution of the test ahead.<- выполнение теста назад: с конца диска. >?< - чтение по случайным адресам. >|< - тест «бабочка»: чтение попеременно сначала и с конца диска. Break All – отмена всех команд. Sleep – остановить диск. Recall – включить диск снова (после sleep).
advanced. The main window shows the contents of the sector specified in the Sec field. The window below shows the contents of the partition table by clicking the View part data button. The MBR ON/OFF buttons enable/disable the ability to recognize partitions in the operating system.
An example of working with the Victoria program For an example of testing a disk, let's take a faulty HDD WD2600BEVT, which has surface damage and bad attributes in SMART. We launch the program, select our disk and see the following: on the left we see the parameters of the selected disk.
Next, on the SMART tab, you can see the SMART of our disk. Here he is.
We see that the program interprets it as bad. Let's consider in more detail.
Attribute 5 Reallocated sector count - the number of reassigned sectors 1287 - the disk is "stripping".
Attribute 197 Current pending sectors - the number of candidate sectors for reassignment, if the 5th attribute is overflowing, it indicates that the disk is “crumbled”, the surface quickly degrades.
This means that if data is needed from a disk, then you need to copy it immediately, and not try to repair such a disk. The actions that we will consider next can lead to loss of information.
UNCR errors are visible - these are bad, unreadable sectors - bads (bad blocks).
You can uncheck the Grid checkbox, then the disk reading schedule will be displayed. In places of bads, speed dips are visible, marked in red.
At the end of the test, you can try to hide bad sectors by selecting the Remap mode. This can help if there are bads, but SMART is not BAD yet. It looks like this:
The result of the remap can be viewed by reading the smart disk. Here he is:
The value of the 5th attribute has increased and has become 1291. During normal operation, disks, in the absence of access to them, run their own procedures for checking and remapping sectors in the background, and the number of candidates for remap, in the hundreds, indicates that the disk can no longer support conditioned condition and needs to be replaced. And the SMART status does not always adequately describe the state of the disk - it can be badly damaged, and the SMART status is displayed as GOOD.