Hard Drive Question

[misterix]

I have a 2 TB External Hitachi USB 3 Hard Drive. I was transferring 200 GBs of data on my Windows 7 Internal Hard Drive to the External HD. At around the 40gb left mark I forgot that I was transferring files and I accidentally hit the hard drive. I heard an error noise from the hard drive for a second. The impact wasn't hard but it apparently was enough to make the noise. The files seemed to proceed to copy as normal and at the same speed after the incident. I then went to see if all the files copied and it looked good. The hard drive seems to perform as normal afterwards. I ran a chkdsk from the command prompt and it reported no errors or bad sectors. I read online that you can damage your hard drive if you move it while files are being transferred. I don't think that I damaged the hard drive or feel like the files didn't copy correctly. But I am nervous that I might have damaged something. Is there some sort of test that I can run to tell if I physically damaged the Hard Drive?

[MindMergepk]

you must check s.m.a.r.t status on suspected drive,
link here http://www.hdsentinel.com/

[ShaneWard]

More than likely you might have created a bunch of bad sectors on that area of the drive that was being copied, so if you try and read that area again, the drive might struggle.

Although the impact could have activated the shock sensor and the drive parked its heads for protection. if the drive was in a external enclosure then that would offer some protection.

As MindMergepk pointed out, check the s.m.a.r.t data and that will tell you if any bad sectors appear.

Also keep a backup of those files just incase something goes wrong, but I think you are lucky this time. If the heads died, the drive would have stopped working right away.

Shane

[misterix]

Which test should I run extended self-test, random seek test or the surface test?

[ShaneWard]

Do you remember the file you were copying when you hit the drive? If you do, just copy it again and if it does copy it fine then you should be okay.