
You can find a ready-to-use WinPE 5.1 ISO here. I have packaged the necessary Mono files here. Boot your PC from Windows PE (from a CD, DVD or USB) and use Mono to launch Hard Disk Validator. Connect your disk (as a secondary disk) to another PC to test it there.Ģ. You should have no problem performing a read test, for any other test it's recommended that you avoid testing the disk that hosts the currently running operating system. Q: I only have a single hard disk that is used to boot my OS, how can I test it? Write + Verify: The program will write a test pattern to the disk and verify the pattern was written successfully.


This is my hard drive after wiping out a bad sector that was created during a power failure:

Well, the data stored on the sector is invalid, but if your hard drive is functioning properly, you can overwrite the bad sector (and now it won't be "bad" anymore since the sector checksum will be updated as well). Power failure during write is one common reason, hard drive malfunction is another common reason. When a sector is read from your hard drive, it's expected that the sector checksum will match the sector data, if that is not a case, the hard disk knows something went wrong during the write operation, that's called a bad sector. Hard drives write data in block units (sectors), every time a hard drive update a sector, it also updates a checksum (stored immediately after the sector data). This simple utility was designed to help you find out if your hard drive has reached its end of life.
