How To Test Your Computer's Hard Drive

I am going to tell you how to get a definitive answer as to whether your hard drive is good or bad. This step should be done first when you have a problem to rule out the hard drive. Otherwise you could be pulling out your hair thinking it is something else.

On some computers, such as Dell, there is a built in diagnostics utility to test your hard drive. While this is better then nothing, I tend to like to use the manufacturer’s utility for that hard drive. Below are some of the addresses of some of the most popular hard drive manufactures, where you can download their utility. There are times, when you cannot access your operating system that you may need to use another computer to get these utilities and to burn them on bootable disks to use.

If you would like to use the built in utility (if your computer has one), restart your computer and for example with Dell you would press F12 when you see the Dell Logo appear. With Dell a screen will then appear and you can use the up and down arrows to select “Diagnostics”, “IDE Diagnostics”, etc. Depending on the computer the wording may be a little different.

Testing With The Manufactures Utility

Step 1

Find out the manufacturer of your hard drive. This can be done several ways. If you have access to your operating system, you can right click on “My Computer” (XP, Vista, Win 7), left click “Properties”. The system properties box will come up. Click on the “Hardware” tab (XP) then click on “Device Manager”, (Vista and Win 7, look to the left hand menu and choose “Device Manager”). Once the device manager is up, click the arrow next to “Disk Drives” to expand and you should see you hard drive listed.

If you do not have access to the operating system you can open your computer (if you are comfortable doing so) and look at the brand.

Step 2
Once you know your make of hard drive, go to the corresponding site to download the correct utility. See Below:

Western Digital         http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?lang=en

Seagate & Maxtor    http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/

IBM/Hitachi              http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/

These are the most popular. You may have an off brand hard drive, if so, Google it to find the manufacturers site.

Be sure to choose the utility that is an .iso bootable file to burn to a CD/DVD

Step 3

Once the CD/DVD is made, simply put the CD/DVD in the machine to test and boot from it. If your CD/DVD drive is not already set to the 1st boot device, you will have to go in to your computers bios and change the boot order so that the CD/DVD drive boots first. Accessing the bios is slightly different on each machine. Look as your computer boots up. At the logo screen it should tell you what key to press to access your system settings. It is usually “del”, “F1”, F2”, “F10”, or “F11”

Once the computer boots from the CD/DVD, simply follow the directions on screen to test your hard drive.

Hope this helps.