How to Troubleshoot a Hard Drive

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Richard Goms. We're here in Salt Lake City, Utah. We're talking about hard drive basics. I'm going to show you how to diagnose disk drive problems. There are many different programs that are available. There's Windows Scan Disk which comes with the Windows operating system, there is Norton Disk Doctor. But today, we're going to show you how to, how to diagnose disk drive problems with Fix It utilities. We have the Fix It utilities open now. We're going to select Diagnose to diagnose the hard drives. We're going to select Smart Disk Check which is a program that will check for possible potential failures in the hard drive that might be coming up. We're going to do the Short Smart test to begin with and continue. Now what this is doing; it is checking the files on the hard drive for integrity. If it finds that there are bad files it can mark those as in its directory as bad, and then those can be recovered later. Also, if you select the Extended Smart Test it's going to actually check the platters on the, at the recording surfaces on the platters in the hard drive for any physical defects. If it locates any it can create a directory of bad spots on the disk, so that when you do read or write and create files on the disk it will skip over those bad spots."