Purpose of the program

The Victoria program is designed to test various drives: HDD, flash, RAID arrays, also allows you to hide HDD surface defects, if such an option is available. The author of the program is Sergey Kazansky, distributed free of charge, you can download http://hdd-911.com/

Brief description of the program

On Vista and older systems, the program must be run as Administrator even if your Account has administrator rights.

The program window is divided into several tabs: Standard, SMART, Test, Advanced and Setup. The API and PIO switches change the mode of operation of the program with the disk being tested. PIO mode requires chipset support motherboard. Modern systems younger than about 2011 do not support this mode of operation of the program, so we will not describe it. Let's bring short description tab controls.

Standard. The window on the right shows a list of drives installed in the system. These are not only hard drives, but also USB flash drives, SD, CF and other memory card readers. They can be tested too. The device for testing is selected by clicking on the desired item. Immediately to the left in the Drive ATA passport window, information about the selected device is displayed. Seek, Acoustic menegment & BAD "er runs the seek test, allows you to manage AAM (if supported by the disk) and simulate bad sectors on the disk.

S.M.A.R.T. When you press the Get SMART button, SMART is read. USB drives are not supported. The rest of the SMART ON, SMART OFF, Auto save attributes ON/OFF buttons enable/disable SMART monitoring and save read attributes.

test. The main tab with which we will work in the future. The Start LBA/End LBA windows define the beginning and end of the region under test. By default, the entire disk is tested. Pause - pauses the test, the value changes to Continue. Start - start the selected test, change the value to Stop - stop the test. Rhombus with green arrows - moving forward or backward on the surface of the disk. Block size - the size of the block of sectors read at a time, you can leave it alone. Timeout - the time after which, in the absence of a response from the drive, the program will transfer to the next sector. End of test - what to do at the end of the test: stop the disk, start the test again, turn off the disk or turn off the computer. The color bar shows the number of blocks with the specified read time. Verify, Read, Write switches - test selection. Verify - check: the disk reads the sector, but does not transfer its contents to the computer. Read - Reads a sector into the computer. Write - erases a sector - this test destroys user data. Switches Ignor, Remap, Restore, Erase - the mode of working with bad blocks. Ignore - skip. Remap - attempt to remap a sector from a reserve. Restore - try to read data and write back (does not work on modern disks > 80GB). Erase - an attempt to write to a bad sector. It can fix it if an incorrect checksum (CRC) is written to the sector. > - execution of the test ahead.<- выполнение теста назад: с конца диска. >?< - чтение по случайным адресам. >|< - тест «бабочка»: чтение попеременно сначала и с конца диска. Break All – отмена всех команд. Sleep – остановить диск. Recall – включить диск снова (после sleep).

advanced. The main window shows the contents of the sector specified in the Sec field. The window below shows the contents of the partition table by clicking the View part data button. The MBR ON / OFF buttons enable / disable the ability to recognize partitions in operating system.

An example of working with the Victoria program For an example of testing a disk, let's take a faulty HDD WD2600BEVT, which has surface damage and bad attributes in SMART. We launch the program, select our disk and see the following: on the left we see the parameters of the selected disk.
Next, on the SMART tab, you can see the SMART of our disk. There he is.

We see that the program interprets it as bad. Let's consider in more detail.

Attribute 5 Reallocated sector count - the number of reassigned sectors 1287 - the disk is "stripping".

Attribute 197 Current pending sectors - the number of candidate sectors for reassignment, if the 5th attribute is overflowing, it indicates that the disk is "crumbled", the surface quickly degrades.

This means that if data is needed from a disk, then you need to copy it immediately, and not try to repair such a disk. The actions that we will consider next can lead to loss of information.

UNCR errors are visible - these are bad, unreadable sectors - bads (bad blocks).

You can uncheck the Grid checkbox, then the disk reading schedule will be displayed. In places of bads, speed dips are visible, marked in red.

At the end of the test, you can try to hide bad sectors by selecting the Remap mode. This can help if there are bads, but SMART is not BAD yet. It looks like this:

The result of the remap can be viewed by reading the smart disk. There he is:

The value of the 5th attribute increased and became 1291. During normal operation, disks, in the absence of access to them, run their own procedures for checking and reassigning sectors in the background, and the number of candidates for remap, in the hundreds, indicates that the disk can no longer maintain a conditioned condition and needs to be replaced. And the SMART status does not always adequately describe the state of the disk - it can be badly damaged, and the SMART status is displayed as GOOD.

The book outlines methods for recovering data from various storage media - hard drives, RAID arrays, CDs, DVDs, flash memory cards, camera cards and mobile phones. The repair of damaged equipment is considered in the publication only as one aspect of the entire data extraction process. The main topic is the extraction of data damaged due to physical or logical violations in the operation of a computer system or incorrect user actions. The book deals with recovery by accident deleted files, extracting valuable information from broken hard drives; describes programs and methods for recovering data from damaged RAID arrays, which is critical for the operation of corporate computer systems.

The book does not require special preparation of the reader: simple step-by-step data recovery procedures are preceded by a description of the principles of their storage on various media.

Book:

MHDD is small but powerful free program, designed to work with hard drives at the lowest level (bypassing the BIOS). It can diagnose drives, read and write arbitrary sectors, manage the SMART system, and much more.

The distribution kit of the program can be found on the developer's website http://www.ihdd.ru. You can download MHDD as a CD image (file mhdd32verx.x.iso) or as a self-extracting floppy image. On the same site is a new version documentation for the program. By default, the program works with a hard drive connected to the secondary (Secondary) IDE channel as the first device (Master). It can also work with SATA or SCSI drives. The MHDD program has many functions. Here are just a few steps.

Getting disk information.

Scanning the disk surface.

Saving a disk image to a file.

These operations are united by the fact that they are not related to writing data to the disk being checked, that is, they are non-destructive. It is not worth doing anything else with the disk from which the user is going to recover information. The main task is only to assess the situation, and not to check the disk, which is the main purpose of the MHDD program.

1. Burn the program to a CD, and then boot your computer from it. The drive selection menu will appear on the screen (Fig. 2.6). Select the disk you want to examine and enter its number from the list. You can call up this menu at any time by pressing Shift+F3.

Rice. 2.6. Disc selection

2. After specifying a drive (for example, 3), press the Enter key. The program is ready to work with this hard drive. At the top of the screen are registers, or flags. Any IDE or SATA device should report "DRIVE READY" and "DRIVE SEEK COMPLETE", that is, the DRDY and DRSC flags should be highlighted. The BUSY flag signals that the drive is performing some operation, such as reading or writing.

You can get help about commands at any time by pressing the F1 key. Nevertheless, many people prefer to print out a list of commands in advance and put this sheet next to the computer - it's more convenient.

All commands are entered from the keyboard, case does not play a role. Entering any command is completed by pressing the Enter key. The Esc key is used to cancel or interrupt the execution of a command.

3. Enter the ID command to get disk information. Another command, EID, displays more detailed information (Figure 2.7).

Rice. 2.7. Disc Information

4. To scan the surface, press the F4 key or type the SCAN command and press the Enter key. A menu will appear where you can change some settings. By default, the start sector number is zero (start sector). The number of the final sector is equal to the maximum possible (the end of the disk). All functions that can change or destroy data on the disk (Remap, Erase Delays) are disabled by default. Press the F4 key again to start scanning.

MHDD scans drives in blocks. For IDE/SATA drives, one block is equal to 255 sectors (130,560 bytes). As scanning progresses, a block map is built on the screen (Fig. 2.8). To the right of it is the "legend". The shorter the block access time, the better. If there are problems when accessing the block, then the time increases, but if an error occurs, then the corresponding symbol is displayed on the map.

Rice. 2.8. Surface scanning

Everything listed in the legend below the question mark (exceeding the allowed access time) are different variants of unreadable blocks. The interpretation of these errors is as follows:

UNC - Uncorrectable Error, unrecoverable error;

ABRT - Abort, command rejected;

IDNF - Sector ID Not found, sector identifier not found;

AMNF - Address Mark Not Found, address mark not found;

T0NF - Track 0 Not Found, it is impossible to find a zero track;

BBK - Bad BlocK, a "bad" block without a reason.

The main thing here is to understand that all these are the results of physical defects inside the HDA. It is important to decide how to save the data, not how to repair the hard drive. The caution when scanning is not to get carried away with diagnostics. However, the appearance of the map may suggest some conclusions.

Regularly repeating blocks with increased access time are the result of positioning the heads on the next cylinder. This is completely normal.

Randomly scattered blocks with various kinds of defects are a sign of the general degradation of the drive. Plates, bearings or heads are worn. Perhaps the hard drive was "beaten" or overheated.

A "spot" in the middle of which there are absolutely unreadable blocks surrounded by blocks with increased access time is a sign of an increasing defect on the wafer. It is necessary to urgently extract the image.

Strictly and regularly repeating identical groups of inaccessible blocks are a sign of a faulty head. If desired, you can even calculate this head based on the physical geometry of the disk. If the most important data is on the surface of the plate served by this head, the hard drive must be repaired under special conditions. Perhaps the plate is not completely scratched yet.

A useful feature is Acoustic Management. Noise, of course, does not excite the user. However, the noise level emitted when the heads are moved is reduced by reducing the speed of their movement. For a faulty hard drive, this may be a measure that can facilitate its operation.

1. Type the AAM command and press the Enter key. Here you can see the possible values ​​of the parameter supported by this hard drive.

2. Enter the value corresponding to the quietest operation and press the Enter key. This will help the hard drive a little, especially the head block, for the duration of further manipulations.

On these steps, the diagnostics ends and data recovery begins. The MHDD program is capable of copying individual sectors or an entire disk to a file or set of files. Defective unreadable sectors are skipped by the program.

The TOF command copies the specified range of sectors (by default from zero to the last sector of this disk) into a single file. The image file size cannot exceed 2 GB. If the user decides to create a disk image larger than 2 GB, then it is better to use the ATOF command, since it can automatically divide images into separate files.

1. Type the TOF command and press the Enter key. The Fast Disk Image Creator prompt will appear (Figure 2.9).

2. Enter the number of the starting sector and press the Enter key.

3. Enter the number of the last sector and press the Enter key.

Rice. 2.9. Creating an Image with the TOF Command

4. Enter the path and file name of the image to be created. The name is arbitrary, and the file must be created on another physical disk.

5. Press the Enter key to start copying.

Upon completion of copying, you can turn off the problematic disk and no longer deal with it, but with the file - its sector-by-sector copy. This will protect the disk from further damage: if the hard drive starts to fail, every extra minute of work can add new bad blocks to the platters or completely ruin the damaged head. The user needs to start his communication with the problematic disk with copying, and postpone the diagnostics.

Which program to make a copy of is an open question. There is no definitive answer to it. The MHDD program and the very similar Victoria program create fewer problems when reading hard drives with numerous physical defects. Such problems may be the freezing of the program itself or the entire computer when trying to read some bad sectors. On the other hand, the R-Studio program is somewhat more convenient, especially since you still need to extract data from the image using this program. Conclusion: you can try using several programs.

The MHDD program is a powerful tool that is designed to work with hard drives of computers, laptops, as well as external hard drives. Work with drives occurs at a low level.

The functions that the MHDD program performs:

• Diagnostics hard drive.
• Manage the SMART hard drive system.
• Possibility of password protection.
• Changing the sound characteristics of the hard drive.
• Resizing the drive.
• Recovery and low format hard drive surface

How to run the MHDD program

First we need to download the program, it is in the public domain for everyone and is completely free.

After you have downloaded the program, you need to write it to a flash drive, for this we will use the program. Open the downloaded image using the UltraIso program.

After we have opened our image, open the menu item "Boot" and select the menu item "Burn disk image ...".

In the window that opens, select the flash drive that we will use to record the program, and click "Record".

After the recording is completed, you must restart your computer and boot from the recorded flash drive. Don't forget to switch your controller to IDE mode as the program only works with this type of controllers. After loading from the flash drive, select the 2nd menu item and press Enter, the choice is made using the Up, Down keys.

Now we will see all the hard drives available and connected to the computer. To select the desired disk, you must enter its port number, in my case it is port number 1.

After that, the program is ready to work with the selected hard drive. To re-select the hard disk, press the key combination "Shift" + "F3", so you can select another drive to work with it at any time without restarting the MHDD program.

The list of commands for the MHDD program can be seen by pressing the "F1" button. Press the down key to scroll through the commands.

Viewing SMART Information

You can view the SMART status of your hard drive by using the “smart att” command and pressing the “F8” key after entering. Now we see the SMART information of the hard drive.

The main attributes to look out for are:

Reallocated Sectors Count - this value indicates the number of sectors that have been reassigned by the hard disk, if the value in the "RAW" column is greater than 50 (100), then you need to replace HDD, or urgently transfer all important information to another hard drive that is in good condition.

HAD Temperature - this parameter shows the temperature of the hard disk, the normal temperature for work hard disk ranges from (Val) 20°C to (Worts) 40°C, (RAW) average 30°C, if the value is higher, you need to think about cooling.

Ultra ATA CRC error rate - means the number of errors that occur when transferring data over an IDE / SATA cable. The value of this attribute must be equal to zero, if the value is greater, then it is necessary to replace the cable, or remove the overclocking of the hard drive, if any.

By looking at the SMART hard drive, we can understand what state it is in and take action.

Scanning the hard drive and checking for errors

In order to scan the surface of the hard disk, you must use the "scan" command, when you enter this command, press Enter, a window with scanning parameters will open. After selecting the desired options, press "F4" to start scanning.

Basic options for scanning a hard drive:

Start LBA and End LBA parameter which specifies the sector from which to start scanning and the sector on which scanning must be completed.

Remap - this parameter will allow you to automatically remap the bad (erroneous) sector that will be detected during the scan.

Erase Delays - if you enable this option when scanning a hard disk, then when a broken (erroneous) block is detected, the program will overwrite such a sector. The drive will recalculate the ECC fields for each sector. This helps to get rid of the so-called "soft-bad" blocks, which are caused by system errors, and not by physical damage to the hard drive.

If you are running a hard disk scan for the first time, you must scan it without activating the Remap and Erase Delays options, as these options can lead to data loss.

In the event that the first scan found bad sectors, it is necessary to transfer all the information from the hard disk and scan with the Erase Delays option enabled, to do this, when selecting the scan options, turn this option to the “ON” state and start scanning.

After scanning with the Erase Delays parameter, we run another scan without enabling any parameters to determine if there are any bad sectors left. If the rescan has identified the remaining bad sectors, we can be sure that this is physical damage to the hard drive, in which case it is worth resorting to a more radical solution, namely, running a rescan with the Remap option enabled.

In the event that when you start the scan you see that each block is detected as a bad sector, it makes no sense to carry out low-level formatting. In this case, the hard disk surface or the service area is damaged, standard means MHDD programs will not be able to fix this.

Low level formatting

To low-level formatting it is worth resorting to if you need to completely delete information from the hard drive so that it cannot be restored, since when deleting information in Windows, you can restore deleted files.

Or your hard drive has slowed down significantly, and began to work slowly, but no bad sectors were found, then sector-by-sector erasing can restore the read and write speed of the hard drive.

In order to start formatting, enter the “erase” command and press Enter, we will be prompted to enter the number of the block from which we want to start formatting, and the number of the block where we want to end. If you are going to format the entire surface of the disk, then do not enter anything, since the standard suggests the first and last sector, but simply agree by pressing Enter. To start formatting, enter the value "y" and wait for the end.

Reducing storage capacity

The "hpa" command is used to reduce the size of the drive, when entering the command, the MHDD program will ask for a new number of available sectors, enter a new number and press Enter. Also, in order to remove restrictions on reducing the size of the hard disk, use the "nhpa" command.

Password protection management

In order to set password protection on a hard drive, you need to use the "pwd" command (not all hard drives support this feature). Password protection suitable for those who need to save information even if the hard drive is lost, since it will not work to crack this protection, in order to remove the password from the hard drive, you must completely erase the data. Also, when installing such protection, it will not work to start the system without first entering a password on the hard drive.

Please note that password recovery will not work, and in case of loss of the password, the information will not be restored.

HDD Noise Control

Now almost all modern drives support the Acoustic Management function. You can greatly reduce noise hard disk when moving the head, by reducing the speed of movement, but at the same time, the speed of writing and reading the hard disk will decrease. To configure this feature, use the "aam" command and press Enter. After that, you need to enter a value from 0 to 126, where 126 is the maximum quiet level of operation, to cancel this parameter, you must enter the value "D".

Conclusion

The MHDD program is a fairly functional solution for working with hard drives, but also quite dangerous, since improper use can lead to data loss or hard drive failure. The program will allow you to work with different types hard drives with different controllers.

In the course of their work, they will certainly wear out. Wear and tear can be manifested by slow computer operation and freezes. And all due to the fact that unreadable sectors appear on the surface of the hard disk, or as they are also called BAD blocks.

To check the hard disk for bad sectors, there is a very good and free MHDD program. With its help, you can not only find bad sectors, but also try to fix them (reassign).

How to use the MHDD program?

First, we need to write the MHDD boot image to a USB flash drive, since the program runs from under DOS.

We insert the USB flash drive into the USB connector of a computer or laptop and, or you know, we burn the downloaded MHDD image, thereby creating a bootable USB flash drive.

After the flash drive is written, you need to preliminarily work the hard drive with ACHI in IDE. If this is not done, then MHDD will not see your hard drive.

If you did everything correctly and booted from a USB flash drive, then you will see this window:

Initial MHDD boot window

In it you need to press "Enter", after which the main window of the MHDD program will appear:

Selecting a hard disk by entering the appropriate number

We type a number and press "Enter".

To display a window with the settings for checking the hard disk, click F4 on keyboard.

Check settings

Here, use the arrows to go down to the line "Remap", press "Enter" and select "On". This enabled the reassignment of bad sectors. So that MHDD not only finds them, but also marks them as unused.

Now click again F4 after which the hard disk check for bad sectors will start.

In terms of time, the check lasts from 20 minutes to 4 hours, depending on the size and speed of the hard drive. A 1TB disk is checked for about 2-3 hours.

The window on the right displays the test results. Sectors with a response time of 500MS or more (brown and red) are considered to be bad, and the more of them, the worse. UNC (red crosses) are bads - unreadable sectors.

Check results - BAD sectors

Since the option was enabled at the beginning of the check Remap- reassignment of BAD sides from the reserve area, then it is possible that after a complete check of the hard disk by the MHDD program, the bads will be removed and the hard disk will work for some more time.

If, at the end of the check, there is not a single sector below 150MS (green) at the top right, this means that the surface of your hard disk is in perfect order and there are no BAD sectors on it.

Now you know how easy and simple it is to use MHDD and how to use it to check your hard drive for bad sectors.

The best way to thank the author of the article is to repost to your page

Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter. An inscription that sends legions of goosebumps down your spine, each one the size of a hard drive. According to the law of meanness, this happens when nothing portends trouble. But do not rush to frantically restart the system - this is a game of Russian roulette. It is better to boot from another medium and take up a thorough check. A proven tool - MHDD - will help in this.

Introduction

If SMART shows problems, most often this means one thing: the disk is about to start to crumble, and even unnecessary OS loading can affect. The next thing to understand is the software "bads" or hardware ones on it. If there are not so many hardware ones, then you can still try to bring the disk back to life.

I think you have heard of products like MHDD and Victoria. They are indispensable for low-level hard disk work and will help you accomplish great feats of recovery and diagnostics. About Victoria, now it's time to deal with the second - archaic, but still mega-useful utility.

MHDD is a small but powerful freeware program that is designed to work with drives at the lowest level (as far as possible). The first version was released by Dmitry Postrigan in 2000. It could scan the surface of an IDE drive in CHS mode. Now MHDD is much more than diagnostics. With MHDD, you can do anything: diagnose drives, read and write arbitrary sectors, manage the SMART system, password system, control system noise characteristics, as well as change the size of the drive.

Despite the fact that work with MHDD is possible through installed Windows, I highly recommend burning the image to a USB flash drive or an external (or second boot) drive and booting bare DOS from there. Believe me, in a hardware issue it is better to exclude as much as possible all the links in the chain that can lead to glitches or computer freezes during operation.

Oh those interfaces

Not every interface can be correctly recognized by the program.

SATA interface. There is a possibility that the disk will not be detected in MHDD. The reason may be the operating mode of the SATA controller (IDE and AHCI) in the BIOS. MHDD, alas, does not support AHCI mode. Need to change BIOS settings. Worst of all, not all motherboards now support this mode. The only way out can be to use a machine with a suitable motherboard or to refuse MHDD.

IDE interface. For this interface typical distribution of devices on the loop - master / slave. By default, MHDD hides all devices in slave mode. There are two ways to fix this. The first is to change the location of the hard drive (switch the jumper to master) and check that the settings in the BIOS match. The second way is to try changing the disk number to 2 or 4 in MHDD. And don't forget about the mhdd.cfg configuration file, which is in the CFG folder. AT this case the parameter PRIMARY_ENABLED=TRUE is important.

SCSI interface. The SCSI controller driver may not be detected.

USB interface. It is theoretically possible to connect a disk via USB using an additional driver and program settings. The driver emulates the mode of operation via SCSI. It is also necessary to disable all unnecessary USB drives. The target disk must be connected before MHDD can be loaded. You will need to write in config.sys: device=X:\USBASPI.SYS /w /v , where X:\ is the path to the disk.

So, I take one of the broken disks from the shelf (I usually stick a broken label on them) and now I will try to resurrect it to show you how it works in practice. I had a WDC screw WD7500BPVX-60JC3T0 on my hands with a vinaigrette instead of the system and all the files on it.

Since the situation is so sad, I can format the disk up and down with a clear conscience, which greatly simplifies my task. But first, let's deal with a little theory and recovery plan.

getting ready

Initially, the disk must be initialized by the program, which is quite logical. After that, a surface scan is performed, which gives an understanding of the current state of affairs: MHDD will show the state of the hard surface. Then you will need to format the disk and check again. Usually at this stage, the soft-bads disappear, and only the hard ones remain. Then it will be possible to execute the REMAP procedure in order to reassign the bad blocks to the service area.

The main problem is that the service area is not rubber, and even after all the operations you need to look after the disk. If bad blocks continue to appear, then the disk, no matter how hard you try, is no longer a tenant. But in more successful cases, this method should help. As practice shows, after a remap, a disk can work for a very long time and even outlive its neighbors in the basket. Other times, it dies immediately after the reboot - it's just as lucky, and it's almost impossible to predict the effect.

Don't kill

Ditching a disk is much easier than restoring it. For example, everyone knows (or should know) that disconnecting the cable during operation leads to sad consequences. We also strongly discourage you from thoughtlessly switching flags and executing commands in MHDD. Read the documentation carefully and don't start doing something if you don't fully understand what it can lead to.

Well, you can get down to business! First, create a bootable flash drive. For this I recommend - full instructions and DOS itself is. When the media is ready, all that remains is to throw MHDD into its root, so as not to once again climb directories from the command line.

In order for the disk connected to the first channel to be accurately displayed, you need to edit the mhdd.cfg config, which is located in the CFG folder.

PRIMARY_ENABLED=TRUE

As I said, scanning of any device is possible only if it is determined by the ID or EID commands (or by pressing F2).

Scanning

To scan, type SCAN and press ENTER or use F4. A menu will appear from which you can change some of the settings. By default, the start sector is zero (start sector). The end sector is equal to the maximum possible (the end of the disk). All functions destructive to user data (Remap, Erase Delays) are disabled by default.

Let's go through the scan options.

• Start LBA- the initial sector for scanning, by default 0, that is, the beginning of the disk.
• End LBA- sector of the end of the scan, by default the end of the disk. Sometimes it is more convenient to scan not the entire surface (especially when the disk volume exceeds several terabytes), but only the work area where the OS is located. For example, disk C is 50 GB, then the target area will be 2 * 50 * 1024 * 1024 = 104 857 600th sector. You can calculate it easier: (volume * 2) * 1,000,000, total 100,000,000.
• Remap marks the sector as bad in a special service area, after which the disk does not access it.
• timeout- delay time for reading a sector, after which the check proceeds to the next sector.
• Spindown after scan- stop the hard disk after scanning.
• Loop test/repair- to carry out scanning or checking cyclically.
• Erase Delays- erase sectors in which read delays are detected.

Press F4 again to start the scan. MHDD scans drives in blocks. For IDE/SATA drives, one block is equal to 255 sectors (130,560 bytes).

Here's how scanning works:

1. MHDD sends a VERIFY SECTORS command with LBA number (sector number) and sector number as parameters.
2. The drive raises the BUSY flag.
3. MHDD starts a timer.
4. After the drive has executed the command, it omits the BUSY flag.
5. MHDD calculates the time spent by the drive and displays the corresponding block on the screen. If an error (bad block) is encountered, the program outputs a letter that describes the error.

MHDD repeats steps 1-5 until the end sector. If a scan log is needed, it can always be found in the log/mhdd.log file. During the scan, you can see many rectangles of different colors. So that you are not too scared, I give an excerpt from the help:

The presence of red (>500 ms) blocks on a completely healthy drive is unacceptable. If they are, it is necessary to erase (erase) the entire surface of the disk and, if this does not help, get rid of delays, we can conclude that this drive is no longer reliable enough. Alphabetic blocks like x , S , etc. are not allowed: they indicate the presence of bad blocks on the surface.

The first thing to be done is to completely clear the surface with the erase command. If this does not help, then scan with the EraseWaits option enabled. If the bad blocks have not disappeared, you should run scan with the Remap option enabled.

Restoring

If the scan reveals errors, the first thing to do is to copy all the data from the drive (if you need them, of course). In my case it was irrelevant. Then you need to completely clear the surface using the ERASE command, which erases each sector on the drive.

The drive will recalculate the ECC fields for each sector. This helps to get rid of the so-called soft-bad-blocks. If erasing does not help, run a scan with the REMAP option enabled.

If you see that each block contains an error, do not try to erase the drive or scan with the REMAP option enabled. Most likely, the drive's service area is damaged, and this cannot be fixed with standard MHDD commands.

The attentive reader, looking at the pictures of the disk scan, probably whistled and shook his head in dismay. Yes, my disk, while I was writing the article, died completely. The number of hardware bads exceeded all permissible limits, and by the time the last lines of the article were filled, it was already crunching like a Belarus tractor. This is by the way that if the disk starts to crumble, then you cannot trust it, especially if hardware bads appear. Remap can help when the disk has not yet begun to actively crumble, but defects have appeared on the surface. In any case, even if you managed to fix it, use such a disk only for non-critical data and in no case as the main one.

What do the indicators indicate?

• BUSY- the drive is busy and does not respond to commands;
• WRFT- write error;
• DREQ- the drive wants to exchange data with the outside world;
• ERR- an error occurred as a result of some operation.

When ERR lights up, look at the top right of the screen: the type of the last error will be displayed there:

• AMNF- Address Mark Not Found - access to a specific sector failed. Most likely means that the sector is corrupted. However, immediately after turning on the drive, just the opposite is true - it indicates the absence of problems and reports the successful completion of internal diagnostics;
• T0NF- Track 0 Not Found - zero track not found;
• ABRT- Abort, the command is rejected;
• IDNF- Sector ID Not found;
• UNCR- Uncorrectable Error, an error not corrected by the ECC code. Most likely, in this place there is a logical bad block.

Two more indicators may appear at the top: PWD signals the set hardware password, HPA appears if the drive size has been changed using the HPA command (usually used to hide bad blocks at the end of the disk).