How to check if an apparently broken laptop HDD is u/s

[paul456]

I bought a 2ndhand Toshiba L850 1D5 laptop fitted with a Toshiba MK6475GSX(S1) 640GB hdd.

It ran extremely slowly, frequently rebooting without warning, and eventually the Toshiba Recovery Wizard advises 'Bad hard disk'.

It is over 20 years ago I last had a HDD fail on me, think Windows 3.1. In those pre-USB days I remember using a DOS bootable floppy to both check HDD integrity and format the internal HDD prior to installing DOS/Windows. The HDD probably has failed, but just in case a virus or other fault caused the 'Bad hard disk' message, as the value of the laptop not worth purchasing a brand new HDD I would like to check the HDD really is a write-off using an independant utility.

Can your members with recent experience of such utilities recommend a free DOS based HDD checker that can boot off a USB floppy drive or CD ? (my other machine uses Win7 Pro)

[northwind]

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

[paul456]

Thanks for the advice. Read the FAQ & Documentation. Am I correct in thinking just initiating a 'Scan' will report sufficiently whether the HDD is completely broken or potentially restoreable ?

As its many years since using DOS, want to check I am preparing MHDD correctly.

On my Windows7 PC I formatted a 3.5"floppy with the 'Create an MS‑DOS startup disk' checked. Result was a floppy with 10 visible files, 556KB used 867KB free.

Which of the following 2 links is best to use ? (the link to mhdd site didnt work for me)

http://hddguru.com/download/software/mh ... floppy.exe 537Kb

http://hddguru.com/download/software/Ma ... r_v2.0.exe 699Kb

I see the 'Magic Boot disk v2' has in addition to MHDD v4.6, useful tools like FDisk. Format.com, SATA drivers.

In either case, do I just copy the downloaded file to the new floppy and extract to complete MHDD preparation ?