How to Test Health of Your Hard Disk on Windows 8 or 10

The hard disk is one of the main component that makes your system run accordingly. What if this important part of your computer fails? Obviously it would be the worst thing. So, how can you keep track of your hard disk and prevent its failure. To help you out, we have mentioned a few useful steps below on how you can test the health of your hard disk and prevent it from spoiling at the right time.

Step 1: Check for Errors Present in Hard Disk

By using ‘Chkdsk.exe’ utility you can check for errors or bad sectors present in your system hard disk. This utility is available for all the versions of Windows released recently. You can follow any one of the two suggestions mentioned below to run this utility and solve the general issues related to the disk.

1. Run it (Chkdsk) through the command lines. Click here for details.
2. Open windows explorer and choose ‘Properties’ after right clicking on the drive that you want to check for errors. After this, switch to ‘Tools’ tab and select the ‘Check Now’ option present under ‘Error Checking’.

• For complete physical disk check select ‘Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors’.
• To automatically fix the problem related to files containing errors, select ‘Automatically fix file system errors.
• For fixing of both file and physical errors select both the options.

While this process is being carried out, it is preferred not to use your system for other purpose. Apart from this the process may consume some time based on the size of your hard disk.

Step 2: Understanding the Disk Sounds

Whenever you hear any kind of strange sounds coming from your CPU, the best thing is to turn it off. As this sound may be from your hard disk and it’s preferred to take it as an alarm, before any sort of damage occurs to the hard disk.

Step 3: Detect Before the Error Happens

You can use any good hard disk monitoring utility (like – DiskCheckup) for this purpose. As it will display each and every data related to your drive or disk. It’s a bit tough to understand the details, but running the utility in background is recommended. These monitoring utilities keep a track of various parameters (like – read and write error, temperature and many more) related to your hard disk and inform you when the levels of these parameters are about to reach the danger levels.

So, these were the steps that you need to follow in order to prevent your hard disk from damaging. Through these steps you can also monitor the health levels of your Windows hard disk and take respective measures to solve the existing or coming problems.