Detect Hard Drive Failure Before It Happens
Hack #57 from
PC Hacks by Jim Aspinwall (O'Reilly Media).
Roughly 60% of all disk drive failures are mechanical in nature—from
spindle-bearing wear to read/write heads banging into delicate disk platters—and
now technology built into the drives can report anticipated and specific
failures to give you a chance to rectify the situation, hopefully before it is
too late to retrieve your data.
In addition to monitoring a variety of parameters related to mechanical events
(disk platter RPM, time to spin up, motor current, head seek failures, and
sudden shock to the drive chassis), S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and
Reporting Technology) can report read and write retry attempts necessary due to
defective areas on the disk or head failure or drive temperature. Many
S.M.A.R.T.-enabled drives can also report how many times they have been turned
on and off and the number of hours the drive has been on.
If S.M.A.R.T. is enabled in your system BIOS, the BIOS will check and report any
early or permanent signs of disk failure. You can also monitor your drive's
condition with a S.M.A.R.T.-aware disk monitoring program.
To view all available S.M.A.R.T. information about your drive, try the free
DiskCheck utility from
http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm. DiskCheck is a nonresident
utility that will show you exact drive information and all of the supported
S.M.A.R.T. statuses from your drive. There's also Ariolic Software's ActiveSMART
(http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/)
resident monitoring tool, which provides a wealth of detail on drive status and
notification of potential failures. If you get a S.M.A.R.T. warning about a
drive failing, back up your data immediately and replace the drive.
Hacking the Hack
A failing disk drive is no fun. A failed disk drive is even less so. In my work
in various IT shops, I've encountered a lot of grieving "Have I lost all of my
data?" looks from end users. It is indeed a sad time, but an opportunity to
become a hero. If you can spend the time with various tools to attempt, and even
better succeed, at saving someone else's work, you can feel like you actually
accomplished something in the course of your day besides resetting some
forgetful user's password or plugging their mouse back in.
A plethora of disk drive repair and data recovery tools are available to help
you emulate that fictional superhero "Super DataMan." (OK, he doesn't really
exist, I made him up...)
I've long since given up on the pedestrian Norton Utilities like Norton Disk
Doctor because it does not do enough to spend the time running it, especially
for those really cranky lost partitions, erratic mechanical problems inside the
drive, and when S.M.A.R.T. says the drive is bad or going to be bad soon.
When it's time to recover partitions and data I unlock my arsenal of serious
disk recovery tools, which are:
If your own data recovery efforts fail, you can always resort to a data recovery
service like Ontrack (http://www.ontrack.com)
or ActionFront (http://www.actionfront.com).
This material has been adapted from
PC Hacks by Jim Aspinwall, published by O'Reilly Media, Inc. Copyright
O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2004. All rights reserved.
Covering both Windows and Linux, PC Hacks combines the bestselling Hacks series
style with the world's most popular computing hardware. Hacks for enhancing
performance and preventing problems with your PC include overclocking CPU and
video cards, tweaking RAM timing, selecting the best performing components, and
more. The guide includes advice on reusing an old PC to off-load work from newer
systems as well as ways to prevent security hacks.
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