Free Hard Drive Tools (Part II)

Magic Boot Disk v2.0
Operating System: MS-DOS
Version: 2.0
This MS-DOS boot disk contains the following:

  • Based on Windows 98 Second Edition boot disk
  • Drivers for IDE and SATA CDROM
  • Fixed FDISK.EXE: Support of hard disk drives bigger than 137 GB
  • Patched FORMAT.COM:
    • Option /Q (QuickFormat) now can be used to format floppies and hard disks quickly even if they’re never been formatted before
    • MS-DOS version check has been removed
  • SmartDrive (SMARTDRV.EXE) and other basic MS-DOS stuff such as SYS, ATTRIB, DELTREE, LABEL, MEM, MOVE.
  • MHDD 4.6 with SCSI/ASPI and ATAPI support and Primary IDE enabled
  • USB Mass Storage support drivers for MHDD

Download Magic Boot Disk v2.0:

Self-extracting boot floppy image: Magic Boot Disk — Floppy Creator v2.0
ISO image to burn a CD: Magic Boot Disk — ISO CD Image v2.0

HDDScan
License: Freeware
Author: Artyom Rubtsov
Operating System: MS Windows 2000/XP

HDDScan is a free  low-level hard drive diagnostics tool.

HDDScan supports IDE/SATA/SCSI hard disk drives, RAID arrays, external USB/Firewire hard disks, flash cards.
The tool can scan the surface, view SMART attributes, adjust AAM, APM (Power Management), etc.

Download HDDScan version 3.1

MHDD
License: Freeware
Author: Dmitry Postrigan
Operating System: pure MS-DOS (boot-floppy and boot-CD available)

MHDD is the most popular freeware program for low-level HDD diagnostics.

MHDD supports these interfaces: IDE, Serial ATA, SCSI. Also there is a possibility to access an USB storage, there are drivers for emulation (USB->SCSI).
This software can make precise diagnostic of the mechanical part of a drive, view SMART attributes, perform Low-level format, bad sector repair, different tests and tens of other functions.

Links:
MHDD FAQ
MHDD Documentation
Change log
Last version of MHDD, self-extracting floppy image
Last version of MHDD, CDROM iso-image
Last version of MHDD, just-an-archive (MS-DOS executables only, no SCSI support)
Magic Boot Disk with MHDD

MHDD 4.5 (older version, but includes ATA/SCSI Terminal):
MHDD 4.5, self-extracting floppy image
MHDD 4.5, CDROM iso-image
MHDD 4.5, just-an-archive (MS-DOS executables only, no SCSI support)