SMART Test For Harddrive

When you physically examine your harddrive, you will see a circuit board attached to it. It is usually green in color. This board has some microchips on it. These chips are responsible for communicating with the motherboards to which the drive is attached with a data cable. These chips also do routine self diagnostics to see if there are problems on the drive. One of the most common problems with harddrives is bad sectors. These are physical problems with the drive's storage surface and therefore cannot be fixed. The chips would mark these sectors as unusable to ensure that no data is written onto them. However, once bad sectors are present, it's a cascade of more bad sectors to come.

This self diagnostic is called SMART test which stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. Not all drives support SMART, and not all SMART-capable drives do the same thorough self diagnostics. Server-grade drives tend to have more extensive SMART information about themselves. This can be used by drive manufacturers to determine if a failing drive can be fixed with a firmware update instead of allowing them to be returned. Firmware is a general term used for a bit of software that runs in these microchips.

So how can you read this SMART information from a drive that you suspect is going bad? It's quite simple really. In fact, if you call the drive's manufacturer asking for a refund or exchange, by telling them that you have run a SMART test on the drive and showing them the results, they are more inclined to accept the drive back. Many drive manufacturers release their own SMART reading programs for their own drives, but this is not really necessary because the SMART technology is standardized. Any well-written SMART program can do the job just fine.

The one I use is called DiskCheckup by PassMark. It's a Windows program so it runs on Windows with buttons to push instead of traditional SMART reading programs that requires typing text commands. Installing it is very simple. Once installed, you would launch it and tell it to read the SMART information on any drives that are connected to the computer -- internally and externally.

Below is the link where you can go to read all the gory details.

http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm

So what happens when the drive in question is the one that has your operating system which now does not boot up? If Windows does not boot up, you cannot run any Windows programs including a SMART reading one like DiskCheckup to see if the cause of the non-boot is a bad harddrive or is it just some software corruption? In general, before you install Windows on any drive, a time-consuming and tedious process, you should make sure that the physical drive is in good health. If the SMART readout shows errors, skip that drive and install Windows on a different drive that has passed the SMART test.

This is done by using any of the major Linux Live CDs. They have SMART tools built-in. Simply download the ISO image of these programs, burn it only a CD or USB flash drive, boot from this external media, and have the SMART utility in it do a scan of the target disk.