Check if Hard Drive is BAD

Check if Hard Drive is BAD: A simple way to start to test a hard disk is with a free program called CrystalDiskInfo, it’s a tool to test the health of your hard drive. It helps you diagnose and read the S.M.A.R.T. values. It also gives temperature of hard disk, it supports mechanical drives and SSD solid state drives. Before you start to download this program, there is a warning I want to give you, some versions now carry open candy adware, but don’t let this discourage you from using CrystalDiskInfo there is versions on the site to download without open candy bundled in the freeware software. They are clearly marked like I have shown in my image of download page.

download

So if you hard drive keeps making clicking and whirring noises or keeps crashing and giving you BSOD Blue Screen of Death, then just run Crystal Disk to display details of your hard disk, remember this is just a starting point to troubleshooting issues with your hard disk.  Remember to backup data before carrying out any work on your hard drive, if the drive shows up red or bad, then it’s time to move onto the next test. I have covered some other ways to test your hard drives health.

It gives good information like Power on Hours, this is the amount of hours the drive as been running, firmware, serial number, read error and loads more info.

information

1. To open program click on icon

program

2. Health status should read good, I have posted some images below showing bad drives and caution drive.

  • As you can see the drive is show as BAD 92% raw read error rate.

bad-drive

  • Here we have a drive with Caution and a Temp 56% RED, relocated sectors count.

hard-disk-caution

I seen errors showing up in CrystalDiskInfo before and I have be able to fix it by running CHKDSK /F /R  but I would start of by backing up data just in case drive is going bad.

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Download CrystalDiskInfo

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