Detecting Hard Disk Read Errors

There are many different ways that hard disks can fail. This can be very distressing, because unlike virtually every other part of your PC, when your hard disk dies, it takes your data with it. If your keyboard or modem or monitor stops working, it can be expensive to fix the problem but your files will still be where you left them. Hard disk reliability issues are discussed in detail here.

Many hard drives fail with a bang: one day the drive, instead of spinning up and booting the PC, may go "klunk, klunk, klunk" and then spin down again, and that may be the last you ever see of whatever is on it (unless you have backups). However, many drives fail with a whimper; they slowly develop problems, and if you are astute in detecting them, you can sometimes avoid a catastrophe.

One of the ways that early problems with hard disks manifest themselves is with problems reading a particular area of the disk: a read error. If the disk develops a bad spot where it can no longer reliably read what is written there, you will not know this until you try to read from the sector where the problem is. If it is occupied by a seldom-used file, you may not notice for weeks or months. However, many drives start out with a handful of bad sectors and then develop more later on. This doesn't always happen, but it does often enough that it is very useful to detect these read errors as quickly as possible.

For this reason, utility programs were developed that test the surface of a disk for read errors. They scan over the surface of the disk and read the contents of every sector, looking for problems, and report if any are found. This increases the chances of detecting a problem with your hard disk when it occurs first with seldom-accessed files, before it spreads to more important parts of the disk.

In virtually every case, it takes a lot longer to scan an entire disk volume for errors than it does to check out its file system structures. It also is far less common to actually find a problem. For this reason, we recommend that scans of the disk surface for read errors be done only weekly (not daily like the file system checks.) Since disk scanning can take a fair bit of time, we setup the running of it for when you are not using the PC.

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