Is my HD going bad??? how do I tell?

[Rasha]

G'day folks.

I've had a WD 80g HD for around 5 years now. I run XP SP3 with a pc I bought new 5 years ago. I recently bought a new 80g HD. So the old HD is the "E" drive and the newer HD is the "C" drive to transfer the data to the new C drive.

The E drive won't allow me to defragment or even disk clean-up. It gives me a disk error & says it can't do the task or something like that. Then, at boot-up I've been getting an E drive disk error where it asks me to press F1 to resume. That worked for a few weeks. Now, 3 out of 4 boot-ups take me to that light blue disk check page. It gets to sector 4 & at 98% complete it freezes up and never finishes.

I finally have everything backed-up on the new C drive. So, I am wondering if a HDDerase v4.0 clean and re-format might help? Or, if the HD is simply no longer worth attempting to save anymore?

How does one know if the HD is really going bad or just needs a re-format?

Any thoughts?

[arvika]

Put disk SMART.

[Rasha]

Put disk SMART

Ya lost me there ... what is "disk SMART" & what am I suppose to do with it? What does it do?

[arvika]

SMART describe condition of the disk. You can view it by program Victoria or MHDD.
Search internet for information!

[Rasha]

As found here ...

http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/

MHDD
http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

Victoria
http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/ ... -Victoria/

Is it a simple scanning tool or what? Those links keep talking about floppy discs and boot-up discs?

[fzabkar]

Put disk SMART

Ya lost me there ... what is "disk SMART" & what am I suppose to do with it? What does it do?

Here are a few SMART diagnostic and benchmarking tools.

HD Sentinel (DOS / Windows/Linux):

http://www.hdsentinel.com/

HDDScan for Windows:

http://hddscan.com/

HD Tune:

http://www.hdtune.com/download.html

CrystalDiskMark:

http://crystalmark.info/software/Crysta ... dex-e.html

smartmontools (Linux/Windows):

http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools/files/

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartm ... i/Download

See this article for SMART info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

[Rasha]

Thanks fzabkar - that's what I needed.