Re: HDAT2 - HDD Bad Sector Repair .rar
Ania Cozzolino
Ultimate Boot CD is a live CD on which you can start your computer and that provides programs including HDAT2.
HDAT2 is a program that will test your hard drive and repair the bad sectors if you wish. Indeed, bad sectors are one of the causes of the slowdown of a computer and HDAT2 can exclude them the hard drive. Thus, Windows will stop block by attempting to access to those defective sectors.
Generally, we recommend the Vivard program that is similar and we usually use for testing hard disks. See step 1 of our tutorial : UBCD - Test your hardware
However, sometimes Vivard does not start on some PCs. In this case, you can use HDAT2.
HDAT2 is in the "HDD -> Diagnosis" menu and is available in two different versions.
Use the version "4.5.3" because the "device-level test" is disabled in the 4.8.1 release. (As indicated by Ultimate Boot CD if you go on the line "HDAT2 v4.8.1")
If a bad sector of the hard drive prevents HDAT2 to test your hard disk completely, you can test it by starting by the other side. So, HDAT2 will test your hard disk from end to start, instead of starting from the beginning of the hard disk.
To begin at the end of the hard disk, select "Backward" using the keyboard arrows and press Enter to save the new settings.
Then, press a second time on Enter to start the "Check bad Sectors only" test.
If so, then I'd imagine that there are utilities that can refresh the data, probably by going through the hard drive and reading each part of the data then writing that data anew over the old data, effectively bringing the charge of each bit of data back to full magnetic strength. If so, then are there any good, preferably free programs that can be recommend for this purpose? And how regularly should such a program be run on a hard drive?
It's called "scan for bad sectors", then repair. It's part of Windows' error checking utility under the Tools tab,. which appears after you right-click on a particular hard drive on Windows Explorer. It doesn't exactly write the data anew over the old data, but move data from bad sector to a new , good sector, to prevent data loss.
I've seen decades old HDDs spin up and work but deteriorate and fail in minutes. When you are going to power one up you should be prepped to get data off it immediately. I would use a (pre-tested) USB adapter to access it.
Yes it's true, Spinrite has a "refresh" scan that works exactly as you say. unfortunately it's not free though.
Luckily I've an old version from a job years ago. Comes in handy sometimes for old drives that don't play nice at first.
I would second SpinRite. It can be very useful for last ditch recovery, short of sending it to Drive Savers or somewhere similar.
However, if your drive is larger than say 250GB or so you will likely have issues getting it to work properly.
As far as I know Gibson still hasn't released a 6.1 update that is supposedly supposed to recify this issue.
The arms/actuators didn't correctly function anymore, thus they couldn't "park" their heads on the outer position anymore.
Power down meant head crash/destruction of the platters and subsequent data loss.
The solution was to keep the fixed-disk drive running forever, to never power down.
The university even bought an automatic emergency generator for the fixed-disk drive.
This solution was less costly than replacing the fixed-disk drive and losing data.
Hardly critical, we're talking the usual treasures of a hard drive, such as easily redownloadable games/utilities/whatever, duplicate files taking up lots of space, installation files of programs that I haven't used in decades, home photos, music files, archives I've made containing dozens of working mods set up to run with their associated game, etc. If I lost the lot then I wouldn't miss 95% of it, wouldn't even know what was lost, but like many people, I am a virtual hoarder, and I like to have backups of everything.
Puran Diskfresh
Free and faster because it runs from windows. Spinrite has a bug that limits the hdd size to less than 640gb, in theory is a Bios bug but I've never found a solution for that, that's a big problem for nowadays hard disks.
Hdat 2 is free and can also be used to refresh but it is slower for that.
I also recommend SpinRite. The latest version 6.1 is in alpha now and registered owners of 6.0 will have access to it shortly according to the last Security Now podcast I listened to. 6.1 will support drives over 2TB and run exponentially faster, meaning large drives will complete their scans in a sane amount of time. You also have free access to older versions, which work better on DOS-formatted drives and floppy drives. It's part of my maintenance plan for my retro systems. I use SR 5.0 on my DOS systems as well as my 3.5 and 5.25 floppy drives. It helps prevent bad sectors from developing and can help relocate data on bad sectors to spare sectors. It's not cheap ($90) but I've used it so much in the 10 years I've owned it that it's more than paid for itself.
The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
Let's benchmark our systems with cache disabled
DOS PCI Graphics Card Benchmarks
I've used Diskfresh and it's good, but it only does the equivalent of a level 2 scan, and does not have the ability to recover data -- only refresh it. SR can work the sectors much more thoroughly with higher level scans and also relocate data from bad sectors when the drive can't do it itself. I've run SR on drives up to 2TB (1.8TB formatted). For sure, it runs slow on these large drives, but it does work.
Okay, I've seen that error before, but I don't recall it being related to specific drive sizes. More with motherboard. I don't recall the exact motherboard model it works well on, but I do believe it is an Intel mobo from around the Core2 (Conroe) period. It has SATA and PATA ports, so I use it for all my HDD scans at work. At home, it works fine on my Pentium and 486 systems. I don't think I've tried it on my daily driver (Haswell based system). If I think of it, I'll get the motherboard model tomorrow when I'm at work.
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