Needless to say, Vista doesn't like to do that. Scan.Recently I needed to format some brand new hard drives in. I also have a Linux Mint drive somewhere, are there any good tools on Linux that I could run a scan test with?
It started pretty much immediately.Īny suggestions on what to try next? I have a few other Win7 installations on laptops that I could try, and a Win10 for a GX620. I've now transferred the drive and cable back to the Dell 755, Win7, and have started another scan, and less than 0.5% into the scan, I'm again seeing orange blocks every 13 seconds, for almost two seconds. And in both cases, I was attaching the cable to the front panel USB ports, USB 2.0. This is the scan preformed on the Dell GX260, with WinXP. The SMART data is similar to before, though I notice that the status (top right) says "UNKN" is that because it's connected via USB?Īlso, you can see that there were no orange or red blocks found this time, just the one green block, the second block, and the rest greys.
I'll post results at the end of the scan.Īre there any other free (or demo) HDD software that are good to test drives with?Īlright, that scan finished. I'm not sure what to think of the drive now. There was one green block right near the beginning, all the rest are the 3 shades of grey.
The drive was blank, no visible files or folders, but I ran a file undelete program on it for a few hours, and it found a lot of files, and it seems to be able to recover any file I tested ok.īut anyway, I was running the scan yesterday, and after I posted here, Victoria began finding bad (red) blocks, I think it found about 5 or 6 by the time I halted the scan at about 20%.Įven weirder now is that I'm running a new scan on the drive, on a different PC (Dell GX620 with XP), and it's gotten to nearly 50%, and it's scanning faster (about 34000kb/sec, versus about 24000kb/sec, IIRC, yesterday on the Dell 755, Win7), but there have been no orange, nor red, blocks yet. I picked the drive up at a car-boot sale last weekend for €1, assuming that the drive was dead, and that I might be able to use the case with another 2.5" SATA drive, so I was a bit disappointed to discover the crappy internal drive with USB connector built-on, without a SATA to USB board.
If there were "true" bad blocks, wouldn't it be more random? Is this something to do with formatting, or manufacture of the drive surface that I'm seeing an interval like this? As the scan has progressed, the intervals have changed, but are still in the range of 710000 to 730000. When I was initially checking the interval, maybe 4 times out of 5 it was exactly 716800. So I'm running the scan through USB 2.0 (my PC is an older Dell 755, and only has USB 2, not 3).Īnyway, Victoria reports the SMART data, and it looks ok (see attachment 1), but during the scan (at 6% currently), I'm getting "3.0s" (orange) errors, no red ones yet.Ĭuriously, the orange errors seem to be occurring at fairly regular intervals. It's a mechanical drive, but has the USB 3.0 connector directly on the drive board, no intermediate SATA USB board like on some other external drives. I'm currently running a scan with Victoria (4.73b) on a WD Elements external hard drive (WDBUZG0010BBK-03).