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Five methods to check your hard drive health in Windows 10 - St. George Daily Spectrum

George Cox, PC Periodicals Published 9:15 a.m. MT March 30, 2020

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George Cox

 (Photo: Submitted photo)

The most precious part of your computer is the hard drive. It contains all your data, if anything happens to it, it is all gone, and you could lose all your life's work. So, it is important that you know its health. Your hard drive starts developing bad sectors with time, which leads to permanent damage. You need to know how to check your hard drive health.

There are five methods to check the health of your hard drive in Windows 10.  There are two tools are in Windows 10, and there are three external tools. These tools let you check bad sectors in your hard drive also.

Method 1- using WMIC tool  

WMIC is the abbreviation of Windows Management Interface Command, is a simple command prompt tool that returns information about the system you are running it on.  This tool can be used to check your hard drive.

Open a command prompt and type: wmic diskdrive get status, model

The result shows the disk drive status.  If the status shows 'OK' the health is good.

If status shows 'Pred Fail' the health is not good (get immediate technical help and backup your data ASAP).

Method 2- using CHKDSK tool

CHKDSK is short for - Check Disk, and the chkdsk is a command run utility that is used to check the file system and status of the system's hard drives.

Open a command prompt and type:   chkdsk c:

The tool checks the file system (in read mode) and provides a summary of issues on the drive.  Towards the end of the summary, there is a comment line 'bad disk sector summary' that indicates the number of bad disk sectors – it should be zero.  If not, get immediate technical assistance, as your disk drive needs to be replaced ASAP.

Method 3- using hard drive manufacturer software

Most disk manufactures have software tools that can be used to check the status of your disk drive, so check the website for your disk drive manufacture.

Seagate drives have a software tool called Sea Tools that can be downloaded.  Western Digital drives have a tool called LifeGuard that can be downloaded.

Method 4- using CrystalDiskInfo

CrystalDiskInfo is a free software program that can be downloaded and will provide lots of information about the status of your disk drive(s).

This program examines the 'Smart' status of the disk drives. Blue dots are indicting no problems, yellow dots indicate a warning, and red dots are critical and need immediate attention as disk is beginning to fail.

This program can be downloaded and installed from the following: https://crystalmark.info/en/software

Method 5- using Hard Disk Sentinel

The Sentinel is a purchased product that can provide extensive information about your disk drive health.

There is a free limited trial version, and the purchased product cost approximately $53 for lifetime license for up to 5 computers.

It can be downloaded from: https://www.hdsentinel.com

Keeping your disk drive healthy is very important in keeping your computer running smoothly.  A helpful suggestion if you have disk drive problems is to consider replacing your mechanical disk drive with a new solid-state drive – your disk performance will show a dramatic improvement.

Stay protected!

George Cox is the owner of Computer Diagnostics and Repair.  He can be reached at 346-4217.

Read or Share this story: https://www.thespectrum.com/story/news/local/mesquite/2020/03/30/5-ways-check-your-hard-drive-health-windows-10/2938052001/

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