Hard Drive vendors are complaining that 30% of their returns are fully operational drives. About half of the false returns are due to operating system errors. To help combat this problem and to help customers retain their data the HD manufacturers are supplying free utilities to diagnose the drive. Here are some of the offerings:
Seagate
http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/index.html
Western Digital
http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp#diagutils
Maxtor
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/M...channelpath=/en_us/Support/Software Downloads
Hitachi
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm
In addition Hitachi has this nifty little list of symptoms guide:
http://www.hitachigst.com/hddt/knowtree.nsf/All+hard+drives?OpenView
IBM
This one is disappointing. Two choices offered on the link:
http://www.storage.ibm.com/hddredirect.html
1). Go to Hitachi if it is an after market IBM drive.
2). If it is a preinstalled in an IBM PC there is a broken link to their PC Doctor download, or you can activate the onboard diagnostics with the F11 key (assuming the PC can boot?).
Admin - this might warrant a sticky.
Seagate
http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/index.html
Western Digital
http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp#diagutils
Maxtor
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/M...channelpath=/en_us/Support/Software Downloads
Hitachi
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm
In addition Hitachi has this nifty little list of symptoms guide:
http://www.hitachigst.com/hddt/knowtree.nsf/All+hard+drives?OpenView
IBM
This one is disappointing. Two choices offered on the link:
http://www.storage.ibm.com/hddredirect.html
1). Go to Hitachi if it is an after market IBM drive.
2). If it is a preinstalled in an IBM PC there is a broken link to their PC Doctor download, or you can activate the onboard diagnostics with the F11 key (assuming the PC can boot?).
Admin - this might warrant a sticky.