Diagnosing HDD Failure

[Wildfire]

How can I diagnose if a HDD is on the way out?

[robbieduncan]

If it is an ATA drive on IDE or SATA it will probably have SMART. There are a number of utilities that can check the SMART status of a drive.

[neil.b]

I read an article the other day about Hitatchi having a diagnostic thing on their website that actually goes off the sounds that your drive is making. I never checked it out though.

Sounds like the black arts to me, but you never know.

[Wildfire]

It's in a Laptop so I'm guessing IDE. I looked at the Hitachi thing, looked like it was a boot thing.

[TheExcession]

spinrite from grc.com is not particularly expensive and does a good job of checking your hard disk and can also fix a few problems.

[aldi]

Have a look in the event log, any 'disk' errors particularly bad blocks is bad news. You can also try making an IBM drive fitness test boot floppy, I think it's also on the UBCD you mentioned.