2024-11-22

mhdd

Free Hard Drive Tools (Part II)

DATARECOVERYUNION.COM03 mins

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)

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Low-level Hard Drive Diagnostics Freeware: MHDD

DATARECOVERYUNION.COM03 mins

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

MHDD Interfaces Supported:
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).

What can MHDD do?
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.

Platform:

· Intel Pentium or higher CPU
· 4 megabytes of RAM
· DR-DOS, MSDOS version 6.22 and higher
· Any boot device (USB, CDROM, FDD, HDD)
· A keyboard

IDE/SATA Controllers:

· Any integrated into motherboard north bridge (addresses: 0x1Fx for primary channel, 0x17x for secondary channel)
· PCI UDMA boards (detected automatically): HPT, Silicon Image, Promise, ITE, ATI and so on. Even some RAID boards are supported. In this case MHDD works with each physical drive separately
· UDMA/RAID controllers integrated into motherboard as additional chip

Hard disk drives:

· Any IDE or Serial-ATA drive with size bigger than 600Mbytes, in other words, LBA mode is supported in full.
· Any IDE or Serial-ATA drive with size lower than 8388607 TBytes, in other words, LBA48 mode is supported in full
· Any SCSI drive with sector size 512-528 bytes
· Any SCSI removable media such as tape, CDROM. Maximum sector size for such devices is 4096 bytes

What’s New in MHDD v4.6?

· Fixed rare hangs when working with slave device
· Fixed TOF/ATOF problem with determining maximum file size when operating with SCSI devices
· Fixed displaying firmware version instead of serial number in SMART ATT
· Added PCI device ITE 8211 PCI IDE
· Added PCI device VIA VT6421 IDE RAID
· Fixed several issues with some modern BIOSes
· Jumps while scanning now logged properly
· Resets (“R” key) while scanning now logged properly
· ASPI drivers now have latest versions

Related Links:

· MHDD FAQ
· MHDD Documentation
· Change log
· Magic Boot Disk with MHDD

MHDD Free Download:
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)
· MHDD 4.6

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Few bad troubles on Seagate Barracuda 7.7200

DATARECOVERYUNION.COM03 mins

For example: Seagate Barracuda 7.7200 40Gb. When scan it by MHDD almost all surface looks perfect, but drive have 1 bad block (or little bit more) in first sectors. How to fix the problem?

First rule: if data is important you must save it first, before do any “repair” or you can lose you data in this drive at any moment.

Now, then data saved we can start drive diagnostic. If drive have few bad blocks we can divide situation to the following case:

Universal:

1) software damaged – this is actually not damage, but sectors with incorrect ECC info, simply rewrite sectors to remove trouble.(MHDD erase waits will help)

2) actual damaged – well sometimes surface can be worn and we have actual damage. If we have not very much damage that we can try remap them. Try simple rewrite bad sector (most drives perform remap on write) or use MHDD remap on etc. (then bad sector remapped SMART Reallocated sector count attribute increased )

Seagate 7.7200:

3) head problem – drive firmware detect head problem and switch to “read only” mode. This can be diagnosed by following symptoms:

①. after drive power on, it take long time to become ready (BSY status cleared)

②. drive don’t write if you run MHDD “erase” (not fast erase, but normal erase) everything stopped after MHDD write 765 sectors. (Really nothing wrote at all, if you try writing disk sectors with disk editor, you see what nothing changed)

Such troubles most likely can’t be fixed by MHDD, because they caused by bad head. You should use the head replace tools to fix this problem.

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Most Popular Freeware for HDD Diagnostics (MHDD)

DATARECOVERYUNION.COM01 mins

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

MHDD supports these interfaces: IDE, Serial ATA, and SCSI. Also there is a possibility to access 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, and perform Low-level format, bad sector repair, different tests and tens of other functions.

More information on: http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

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