Hard Drive Tools

March 14, 2015
I got this hard drive that has bad sectors which I didn't even know it had. I thought this was a good time as any to look into some proper tools to check this. Well at least for this one drive I have. I'll add more as I need or find them.

The current drive I want to check is a Hitachi 500GB 2.5 drive. This is a regular 500Gb 7200rpm drive.
Here are the tools I found for this purpose. You can also get the manual for it in the same place.
http://www.hgst.com/support/downloads
I will try this out and see how it goes. I'll update this once I am done testing it out.

Unfortunately I didn't get too far with this tool. I think they are pretty outdated from what it looks like. I got the program installed but I get nothing. It will not see any drive or anything for that matter.

I finally got in contact with Hitachi and they suggested I plug the drive directly to my computer since I have it plugged into the esata port. I want to take a closer look at this so I decided to do a bit of search for a few more tools that may come in handy. I have not used any of them yet so I'll check those out. Here's what I found so far.
Although the article is a bit old, some of the programs are still in use today.
http://www.gfi.com/blog/top-20-free-disk-tools-for-sysadmins/

Here's an article on testdisk
http://www.knowthenetwork.com/2009/02/hard-drive-recovery-mad-eaesy-with-testdisk/

Here are a few others
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/five-apps/five-free-portable-recovery-tools/

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/690-69-fixing-damaged-sectors-reformating-disk-utility

I remember trying out some utilities years back and they actually made things worst, so take these with a grain of salt until you actually test them yourself. This has always been one of those things that you need but they take time, patience and a good program or you will end up losing your information instead.


March 18, 2015
I just finished taking apart my case and connected the drive directly to the spare sata port inside the motherboard. I had a feeling this would not work but since the support at Hitachi suggested I thought I give it one more try anyway. In short as you can see this program is pretty old and doesn't work. You can see that my system does work and sees the drive fine, but this program does not. Heck I can even open the drive like any other drive whether it's internal or external. So they really need to figure out something with their tools as it's pretty outdated from what I can tell and doesn't work. It's all they show on their site too.

My setup for this drive connected directly to the motherboard.

Here's the program opened again and with the other drives showing what I can actually see. So in short, I can't use their program because it doesn't pick up anything. So I'll put this back and connect it through my esata port since I know that also works. I'll start testing other tools to see what if anything works, but that is it for now unfortunately. This of course is a problem because if the manufacturers software doesn't work, you're going to be in a pickle until you can find something that may also work.