I've amased a nice number of HDD's that are supposidly damaged. Before I bin them wondering what programs are truely reliable to test them for sure and if there are any that can repair bad sectors? Thanks
chkdsk will perform an check through the NTFS file system and mark the bad sectors as defective. However chkdsk only works for NTFS so if you're using any other file system then it wouldn't work. I generally use the *nix program badblocks (badblocks -svn <drive>) to perform a non-destructive block level test, if you don't care about the data the switch svw will perform a more thorough write test. The only drawback is since it's block level you don't have any of the advanced features of a modern file system so rather than taking to 20-30 minutes that chkdsk does it could take days on a terabyte drive, however it will detect every bad sector on the drive even if they've already been detected by another program.
And yet I've repeatedly managed to scan my one FAT32 partition with the very same tool. Granted it's not the best tool for the purpose, but it's a good first check. I'd probably use something like the Ultimate Boot CD as it's got a heap of harddisk tools.
I stand corrected I haven't had to deal with a FAT partition since Windows 98, though I guess people must still use them.
SpinRite is pretty good, however it's $90, but if you can find a way to afford that it does just what you want, from a boot CD. Although, as said above, for a block level check expect a run time of days for a large/slow drive.
Isn't spinrite for data recovery? Not after recovering data, just deteremine if these drives are dead
It is, so for a free option to just check the drives I'd go with a linux boot cd and badblocks as recommended above by munky. That said, doing a full format (ie not quick format), should test each block as it zeros it.
