Quite often, you can pay attention to the fact that users are afraid and do not know how to work with the MHDD program correctly. It is for this reason that it is worth considering a few practical recommendations on how to use this program and where its functions can come in handy.
To date, MHDD is the most popular free utility designed for low-level diagnostics of various hard drives. It should be noted that the program was developed by a domestic specialist Dmitry Postrigan. Using this utility, users can carry out a full diagnostic of the mechanical part of the drive, view all kinds of SMART attributes, and also engage in so-called low-level formatting, fixing bad sectors. In addition, the program also contains a large number of other functions, but mostly specialists and ordinary users download it specifically for these procedures.
What is this program?
Since the utility is free, you can download it directly from the official website. MHDD works on the basis of the DOS operating system, and at the same time on the author's website you can download not only the utility itself, but also images of a bootable floppy disk or CD. In addition, there is also detailed documentation of the authorship of the developer himself, as well as answers to questions that most often arise from users of this program.
MHDD is a fairly powerful tool with which you can not only restore a failed drive, but also “finish off” it, so you need to use it wisely and always understand what exactly you can achieve by performing certain actions. The author himself says that MHDD is an extremely powerful, and therefore potentially dangerous program, and no one can be held responsible for any damage that its use will incur while working with a computer. First of all, this warning applies to any information that you store on the tested hard drive, because before you run any utilities, you must correctly understand what exactly they can do with this device and what consequences may be due to using certain commands. In particular, for this reason, it is recommended that you first completely copy all the data from your media to some other hard drive or flash drive.
How does this program work?
It should be said right away that during its operation, MHDD does not use any BIOS functions or interrupts. Thus, the drive does not even have to be detected by your BIOS Setup, and it will be possible to turn on the device after the program itself and MSDOS are activated, because the utility functions directly with the hard disk registers and in no way reacts to any trifles like file systems, partitions, and limitations from your computer's BIOS.
It is worth noting that certain faulty devices, when you try to determine them in the BIOS, create a system hang, as a result of which you simply cannot boot. Also, do not forget that the BIOS, which is used in a large number of old-style motherboards, cannot correctly determine the parameters of the hard drive if its volume is more than 130 GB. If this situation applies to you, then in this case, in the Standard BIOS Setup section, you will need to disable the function of determining the drive that you are going to test using this program.
If, after doing the above procedures, you still could not get rid of the freeze when determining the drive and starting your operating system, then the drive will already be connected after the program itself loads. Of course, such operations should be carried out quite carefully, and ideally, a specialized dual switch should be used in the power supply circuit of the drive, with which it will be possible to supply power through the +12 and +5 volt circuits.
The most important thing to remember is that the program should in no case be run on the drive that you are going to test. In this case, you should not even use drives connected to the same IDE cable that this device is connected to, because in the end you can cause serious damage to the data that is located on each hard drive. It is for this reason that under default settings, MHDD will not work with the PRIMARY channel, because the vast majority of users use it to allocate their hard drives. In addition, in order to ensure the safe operation of this program, it does not provide for the ability to work with those drives that are in SLAVE mode.
To unlock the PRIMARY channel, you must first run the program, then exit it and edit the created file called MHDD.CFG. You can also use the key on the command line / ENABLEPRIMARY, which is a simpler solution to this issue. It will be most optimal to use a special 3.5-inch drive, flash drive, or some kind of disk to load this utility.
Preparatory settings
After you have completely completed all the preparatory activities, you can try to activate this utility. It should be said right away that it will be much easier to get used to this program for those people who are approximately familiar with the internal arrangement of modern hard drives. If you are running this utility for the first time, you should immediately understand that you will need to spend about a few hours or even days in order to start getting meaningful results from using it. It is for this reason that it is strongly recommended that you first test the drive, which definitely does not have any defects, before starting work with faulty devices.
How to scan a device?
To begin with, in the list that opens, you should select the device that you are going to scan. Once the device is selected, you can press the key F1 and start using any commands of this program you need. Once again, it is worth noting that in the process of working with the MHDD program, you should be as careful as possible, especially if you are working with the utility for the first time - once again check the correctness of the prescribed command, and also whether you really know how it should be used and what result it will give you in the end.
If you are currently still a novice user of this program, we recommend that you first familiarize yourself with commands such as scan,stop,EID, CX AND TOF. It is worth noting that some of them can be called by key combinations or simply assigned to certain hot keys. Thus, for example, using the F4 button, you can immediately start scanning the system for errors. Special attention should be paid to the registers, the status of which is constantly displayed at the top of the screen. Any SATA or IDE device must display DRIVE SEEK COMPLETE indicators during operation ( DRSC), as well as DRIVE READY ( DRDY).
Checkbox BUSY indicates that the drive is currently performing a certain operation (reading or writing any data). Some flags are like T0NF or WRFT are obsolete and therefore you should not see them while working with this utility. Also included is the flag INDX, however, in some situations, the program still displays it. When the checkbox is displayed DREQ you can determine that the disk is asking for permission to transfer some information.
If a check box appears while using this utility ERR, then in this case you should carefully analyze the error register, and at the same time you should understand what type of error can occur when working with a hard disk. See the documentation for this program to understand what commands can be used, how to work with registers, and to identify the main types of errors.
To view detailed information about your hard drive, you can use the commands ID And EID. With these commands, you can view detailed information about the operation of this drive, that is, its brand and serial number.
You can scan any hard drive only if it is determined using the above commands or after pressing the button F2. To carry out a full-fledged scanning procedure, you should press the command SCAN and press the button ENTER(default hotkey F4). It is worth noting that a menu initially opens in which, if desired, it will be possible to change certain settings, since by default the initial sector is zero, while the final sector is equal to the maximum possible. Any functions that can be destructive to the information on the drive are initially disabled.
How is the scan performed?
The scanning procedure using MHDD is carried out in blocks, and if we are talking about SATA or IDE drives, then each block includes 255 sectors. The diagnostic procedure itself is carried out as follows:
- The program uses the command VERIFYSECTORS, marking it with the LBA number (number of a specific sector), as well as the number of sectors in the form of parameters.
- The drive raises the BUSY flag above.
- MHDD activates the timer.
- After the hard drive executes the command indicated to it, the BUSY flag will be omitted.
- MHDD determines the time it took the hard disk to complete the procedure, after which the corresponding block with the results is displayed on the screen. If any bad sectors have been identified, then in this case they will be marked with the corresponding letter.
It is worth noting that all steps are repeated until the utility has checked all sectors. If you want to get a detailed log of an ongoing scan, you can always easily find it in a file called log/mhdd.log. In the event that any errors were identified during this procedure, you should immediately copy all information from this drive to a new device.
After that, it will be possible to carry out a full erasure of the surface using the command ERASE, which will completely wipe every sector of the device. In other words, low-level formatting is carried out, after which any attempts to restore information will no longer be possible, but which will allow you in some cases to return the drive to a healthy state.
In order to speed up this procedure, you can use the command with the option enabled EraseWaits, but it should be noted that only the block that contains one or more bad sectors will be erased. Due to this, you can completely eliminate all kinds of soft-bad blocks that are the result of damage to the surface of the device and often occur due to all kinds of power failures of your drive, its overheating, or too much vibration during operation.
If after erasing the hard drive did not start working normally, then in this case you should run a rescan, but with the REMAP function enabled. Thus, hard drives that were often read without failures in some areas are already beginning to detect a large number of all kinds of bad sectors and errors. This indicates that the surface was damaged, and this damage can no longer be repaired. Often such hard drives turn out to be unsuitable for further use, and it is at least unsafe to store data on them.
How to analyze the results?
If red blocks were found during the diagnostic process, you should understand that such a situation is unacceptable for a completely healthy device. In the presence of such sectors, you should immediately carry out a full erasure of the entire surface of the disk, and if this did not help to cope with the problem, it remains only to conclude that the use of this device has become insufficiently reliable. All sorts of alphanumeric blocks, such as S or x are also invalid, as they indicate the presence of downed sectors.
If a letter appears during the scan W, then this indicates that the procedure is carried out with the EraseWaits mode enabled, and in this section, a complete erasure of one block was carried out due to an error in reading some sector. Moreover, if this letter appears again and again in a certain area, this indicates the presence of a bad sector.
The appearance of blue blocks indicates that the function is enabled. REMAP, which was used in relation specifically to this section. The drive replaced the bad sector with a good one, previously placed in the spare area, as a result of which the problem will no longer appear here.
MHDD and working with passwords
The ATA / ATAPI standard provides for the possibility of using passwords on the drive, but in order to get a really correct password, the device will completely ignore any user attempts to read data or write to the hard drive. To lock the drive with a custom password, you should use the command PWD. In accordance with this standard, you will first need to reboot the operation of this hard drive in order for the changes you have made to take effect.
MHDD provides for the use of two commands that allow you to completely unlock your hard drive - these are DISPWD and UNLOCK. The latter is intended to unlock the ability to work with the drive exactly until it is turned off once. To completely deactivate the use of the password system, you should first activate this particular command, and then use DISPWD, but it’s worth saying right away that you must know the password for its further use for your own purposes. In addition, do not forget that hard drive manufacturers also use the so-called master passwords, with which you can also unlock your device.
Commands for Reading Sectors
You can read an entire disk or several specific sectors into a specific file or a created set of files. First of all, you should use the TOF command, which deals with the complete skipping of bad sectors. If you are going to create images that will be more than 1 GB, then in this case you will already need to use the ATOF command, which allows you to automatically cut reviews.
If you want to write sectors from a file to disk, just use the FF command. You will be prompted to enter the number of the first sector to be written to, as well as the total number of sectors to be recorded in a row. These two commands are often required in order to carry out a full recovery of data from failed drives. Initially, a sector-by-sector image of a faulty device is created, after which it is transferred sector-by-sector to another, serviceable hard drive in the same way. Only then it will be possible to use specialized programs that allow you to recover various data.
The most accurate way is to check them through DOS using the MHDD program. In this case, the HDD will not be loaded with third-party programs and processes, only one program will access it, this will reduce the response time and provide reliable results.
What can not be said about, which, working from under Windows, may not produce quite correct results. This is due to the fact that at the time the utility is running, third-party services and processes are running that access the hard drive, increasing the response time.
This means that if you run the test and continue to use the computer at that moment, you will see a large number of slow or inaccessible sectors in the test results. And we don't need it at all.
What is this program
MHDD is a professional free solution for checking hard drives for errors and defects. It boasts a very wide functionality that allows you to carry out not only basic and advanced scans, but also perform HDD recovery.
Since the installation does not take place on a computer, but on a USB drive, MHDD is suitable for all operating systems, including Windows 7 and 10 (32 and 64 bit). It is distributed absolutely free of charge, the interface is quite simple, albeit completely in English.
And now, I propose to move on to detailed instructions for its use.
Where can I download
First you need to download the latest version of MHDD from the official site developers, be sure to in .ISO format, saving it to your computer. By default, the “.zip” archive is downloaded, do not forget to unzip it.
ISO is a special format for writing to a USB flash drive or disk, designed for subsequent launch through DOS.
The utility is also included by default in popular free Live CDs: Hiren's Boot CD, Ultimate Boot CD, 2k10 Live CD and others.
Create a bootable USB flash drive with MHDD
To write to a USB flash drive, we will use a special free program "UltraISO". It is free and distributed in Russian. So please download and install it first.
Save the settings and restart the computer again.
Instructions for use
Now let's talk about how to use the MHDD program correctly.
Next, all hard drives connected to the computer will be displayed. Each HDD will have a serial number to the left of its name. Enter the required number and press "Enter". In my case, this is the number "2". To redefine the disk with which you plan to start working, you need to press the combination "SHIFT + F3".
Now you can start working with the hard drive. By default, the MHDD program will offer you to familiarize yourself with all the commands that are available to us. To open the list of commands, press the "F1" key.
Let's analyze the most popular of them:
As an example, I will run a normal surface scan for bad blocks. To do this, I enter the command "SCAN" and press "Enter".
In the window that opens, I leave all the default values \u200b\u200band press "F4" to start the scan. In this case, all information will be saved, eventually I will receive a report on existing problems.
Just want to draw your attention to the fact that there are other functions:
- Start LBA– the starting point from which the scan will start.
- End LBA- final destination.
- Remap– is used in cases where it is necessary to perform a scan with automatic remapping of bad sectors (used to restore the health of the hard drive). Takes the value " OFF" And " ON”, that is, turn on - turn off.
- timeout– sector read delay time. After the expiration, the transition to the next area will be made.
- Spindown after scan– stops the HDD after the scan procedure is completed.
- Loop test/repair– cyclic check.
- Erase Delays- used to completely overwrite slow or inaccessible sectors. In this case, some of the information on the drive will be deleted. Accepts the value "OFF" and "ON".
To change the parameters in the MHDD program, use the "Enter" key, to move to another parameter, you can use the arrows on the keyboard.
Analysis of scan results
After the check is completed, you will see a window with detailed information in the form of multi-colored squares and letters.
What does each of them mean:
- Gray squares (3-50 ms) - show the total number of the fastest sectors with which no problems are observed.
- Greens (<150 ms) - talk about the presence of slow sectors. A large number of them (above 500) can slow down the speed of the hard drive. However, the presence of green squares is inherent in each drive and is the norm (in reasonable values).
- Orange (<500 ms) - very slow sectors, significantly reducing the speed of the drive. Ideally, they should not exist at all. The presence of at least one indicates the beginning of problems in the operation of the hard drive.
- Red (>500ms)- bad sectors (bad blocks). Significantly slow down the work of the hard drive, cause various failures in the operation of Windows and programs.
- UNC– a failed area that cannot be recovered. Most likely this is a "logical bad block". Usually eliminated by overwriting with the "ERASE" function.
- AMNF– missing address label. Most often occurs due to a malfunction of the hard drive hardware. You can try ERASE or REMAP, but in most cases this does not work.
- ABTR- read request denied. It may appear as a result of a hardware malfunction, or due to the incompatibility of the MHDD program with a specific hard drive.
- IDNF– Identification number not found. Speaks of a malfunction, or an unsuccessful attempt to access the area.
- T0NF– zero track was not found, recalibration failed. Speaks of a defective HDD.
Recovery procedure
Now, judging by the report received, we can proceed further according to the instructions.
It must be remembered that the "Erase Delays" command will only delete some of your files, while the "ERASE" command will completely delete all files. Therefore, I first recommend saving all important files to another medium.
Then we re-check. If some bad blocks remain, then it is obvious that they are caused by a physical malfunction of the hard drive. In this case, only the "REMAP" option, or replacing the drive, will help. Otherwise, such HDD may fail at any time.
Now about how I do it. To begin with, I start a normal scan with the Remap function. Then I start Windows and save all the information to another medium. Then, using the MHDD utility, I overwrite the damaged areas with the “ERASE” function. This approach increases the chances of effective HDD recovery and saves time.
SMART Analysis
In theory, this is the topic of a separate article, but I would like to touch on some values that somehow affect the result of the check and generally show the current state of the hard drive.
To open SMART in the MHDD program, you can use the F8 key or the "SMART ATT" command. We pay attention to the column "RAW". 
The most significant attributes:
- Reallocated sectors count– total number of automatically reassigned sectors (bads).
- Current pending sectors– sectors that are in the queue for reassignment.
- Ultra ATA CRC– the number of errors that occurred during data transfer via SATA cable. The value should be set to zero. Eliminated by replacing the cable or SATA connector.
What actions to take in a particular case, read in the previous section.
Issues you may encounter
It happens that the MHDD utility, even though it is displayed in Windows. It's most likely a physical problem. Try connecting the device to a different connector using a new SATA cable or remove oxides on the board.
If the device emits, then most likely the matter is in the internal mechanism, then only a replacement will help.
A hang-up at the verification stage can also speak of a faulty mechanism. Or the HDD dump in the main menu with the message "driver has been disconnected".
Detailed video on working with MCDD
youtube.be/8gYB4u_2rzc
Updated: 2018-10-19
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MHDD is a program known for its power, designed to interact with drives at low levels. The program was created fourteen years ago by Dmitry Postrigan, and since then using MHDD has become much easier.
MHDD is capable of scanning the surface of a drive that has an IDE interface in CHS mode. The creator dreamed of personal diagnostic equipment that inspires confidence in users.
Today, the capabilities of the MHDD program are not limited to diagnostics. When using the MHDD utility, you can:
- read;
- Record arbitrary sectors;
- Manage the SMART system, the password system, the system that controls the noise characteristics;
- You can even change the format of the drive.
On the site http://www.ihdd.ru you can find a copy of MHDD. You can download the program for use in different forms: archived and in the form of a floppy disk with a self-extracting function.
Log/mhdd.log— the main log file created at the first launch of the program to be installed. It will record the actions you perform in the future.
For the MHDD program to read information from some element located on the drive, you need to send a request to the BIOS. And the BIOS starts searching for the ports of the required drive, checks the data, and exchanges them with the drive. The data is then returned to the operating system.
You cannot run MHDD from a drive that is on an IDE cable to which the tested drive will be connected. There will be data corruption on both sides. Therefore, the program does not interact with PRIMARY. If you need to unlock the PRIMARY channel, you need to start MHDD, exit, edit the MHDD.CFG file. (command term with ENABLEPRIMARY key).
The program has certain requirements for the operation of the software:
- To the processor: Intel Pentium or the latest developments in the world of computers;
- RAM at least 4 megabytes;
- MSDOS must be at least version 6.22;
- Boot device required (USB, HDD, CDROM, FDD).
Requirements for IDE/SATA controllers:
- Must have northbridge integration; PCI UDMA have automatic detection; certain RAID controllers are supported; in the form of a microcircuit, there are UDMA / RAID controllers.
- Drive requirements: IDE or Serial ATA, greater than 600 megabytes, but not more than 8388607 terabytes; a SCSI drive that has a sector size limited to 512 and 528 bytes.
- Switch the drive under diagnostics to MASTER mode.
- You can scan the device if the process is supervised by ID or EID commands (the F2 key is responsible). Type SCAN, press ENTER (F4 key). You can change the settings in the menu.
- You can view the attributes by pressing SMART ATT (F8 key). You can find out the number of remapped sectors. A value greater than 50 should alert. You can look at the attribute showing temperature values. The UDMA CRC error rate will show how many errors there are when data is transmitted over the cable.
- The HPA team is able to limit the cumulative volume.
- The PWD command locks the drive by setting a password.
- Using the AAM command, you can adjust the noise characteristics.
- CONFIG allows you to change the configuration.
If you want to see the help for using MHDD, dedicated to all the commands of the program, press F1. If this program did not help, try the Victoria disk software analysis program.
Recently, manufacturers have seriously taken up the problem of reducing the noise level emitted by drives.
Some have achieved amazing results at the same time - for example, Seagate managed to reduce the noise of the spindle of the fourth "barracuda" so much that it was no longer perceived by the ear.
But spinning pancakes are not the only source of noise in hard drive mechanics.
The actuator is also noisy - its sharp movements cut through the air inside the can, giving rise to a "grunting" sound of positioning.
Of course, it can be slowed down by changing the shape of the current in the coil to a smoother one, but this will inevitably cause a deterioration in such an important hard parameter as access time - it is this parameter that determines the speed of the disk subsystem in multitasking environments and during operations with many small files.
At the same time, there are tasks in which fast positioning is not necessary at all, but silence is needed - for example, when working in office applications, when playing music and movies.
How to be here?
It was this problem that was solved by hard drive developers quite recently - the ATA specification introduced the "Automatic Acoustic Management" (AAM) function - a quick adjustment of the noise level emitted by the drive as a result of the movement of the heads by reducing the speed of their movement.
AAM can be controlled by proprietary utilities of some hard drives, such as IBM and Maxtor.
But they make it extremely inconvenient - the user does not have the ability to quickly assess the current noise level.
In MHDD, all this is implemented much more conveniently: just enter "AAM" into the console, and the hard drive itself will begin to crack its heads, demonstrating its noise level.
And you can change it with the keys "M" (minimum noise level), "L" (medium) and "P" (maximum).
The "D" key turns off AAM completely, while the hard drive becomes as fast as possible, but at the same time as loud as possible.
You can switch the hard drive directly from Windows 9x at any time, unlike other "proprietary" utilities (Fig. 3).
Figure 3. Automatic Acoustic Management
Security Options
Have you ever wanted to protect your information from strangers?
Of course, such a desire sometimes arises, especially if several people work at the computer.
Personal correspondence, documents, or even just a well-functioning operating system - this is not a complete list of what you want to protect and protect from someone else's intrusion.
The most common way to restrict access to confidential information is to create encrypted partitions on a hard drive, archiving with a password, password-protecting the entire file system at the logical level (with special programs in the HDD boot sector), and sometimes physically changing the entire hard drive (for example, using a mobile phone). rack).
But such protection has many disadvantages.
The information still remains on the media, and although it is not explicitly available (protection programs are often limited to encrypting only the boot record, leaving even FAT unchanged), it can be easily extracted from such a disk by setting a disk editor on it, or, (which is easier ) - one of the programs for saving information, for example, the well-known "Easy Recovery".
On-the-fly file encryption is more resistant to hacking, but it requires a permanent memory resident that intercepts part of the system's API and creates a considerable load on the central processor.
And no one is immune from glitching or freezing of such a program at the most inopportune moment.
And if the encrypted partition is damaged (for example, by viruses), it will be extremely difficult to extract information from it.
Ideally, a security system should meet 3 basic requirements:
1. Be independent of the OS, file system, computer and their glitches.
2. Be reliable and hard to break.
3. Do not take away system resources.
And so it would have remained a dream if no one had guessed to entrust this to the hard disk controller!
This was proposed by the developers of the ATA/ATAPI-3 standard back in 1996, but hard drives that actually support security functions have appeared relatively recently.
This chip is called "Security Set", and in common parlance - ATA-password.
It allows you to protect all the contents of the hard drive not only from reading, but also from writing, and even from low-level formatting!
This was achieved by integrating the protection program directly into the hard drive.
It communicates with the outside world through a regular IDE interface - all you need is a utility capable of doing this correctly.
The BIOSes of some motherboards can set a password for modern hard drives, and on many laptops (for example, from DELL), this has long become the norm.
But now we don't need to be the owner of a super-cool motherboard or laptop to protect our information - this can be done on any computer using MHDD!
And not only from the BIOS, but also from DOS and Windows at any convenient time.
Let's try to figure out how it works.
We start MHDD, and by pressing the key combination +, we select the hard drive, access to which we want to close.
We press .
Pay attention to the line "Security: High, Off" - it means that the password for the hard drive is not set (Fig. 4).
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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.