Topic: Hard drive diagnostics

[daveeb]

g'day chaps and chapesses.  Can anyone recommend a program that will do a thorough check on an external caddy drive for bad sectors and other such problems and then fix 'em.  I'm thinking along the lines of the utilities provided by e.g. maxtor with its maxblast program but these afaik only run on internal drives and require booting from a floppy disk.  I've used fdisk on the external drive in question but fdisk is unable to complete the scan, so i'm fairly sure the drive is door stop material (although it works ok but often hangs the pc its attached to at some point) but i'd like to double check.  I dont really want to have to put it inside a pc to check it properly hence the question  

[Sandra]

I think that anything that boots from a floppy will have problems with a USB external drive Dave.
Unless you can somehow add the USB drivers to the disk that you are booting from  :?

Have you tried running CHKDSK on it from inside windows ?

Go to Start/Run type CMD then you need to type CHKDSK X: /F

Where X = the drive letter of your USB drive

[daveeb]

yes Sandra i've tried chkdsk, as i mentioned it cant complete the scan tho' i cant remember the reason given if any, thats why i would like to do a fuller scan to ascertain the problem. I suspect this will be my third maxtor drive that is about to fail, they dont seem to cope very well with heat when they run in close proximity to another drive (the caddy drive used to be the master in my old pc and was subjected to high temperatured for a year or so).  As a side note I recently got some fans that fasten to the underside of (internal) drives. £7.99 at maplins. Installed one to my OS drive in old pc (mesh).  I couldnt find room to fix a second fan to the slave drive as they fit in a purpose made internal caddy, however both the temps have reduced a lot, the OS drive has reduced from ~ 50deg c average to ~38 deg c and the slave without the fan has reduced from ~ 52 deg c average to ~ 45 deg c.  Still quite hot but a big improvement.  Shame there's no room to fit them in my medion offering tho' they currently run around 40 deg c and 44 deg c so the situation isnt as bad.  

edit, i said fdisk in my first post   i meant to say chkdsk oops