Diagnose a Failing Hard Drive
OK, so you have identified that your hard drive may have a problem- what is the next step? If the drive is extremely important and/or is making a terrible grinding noise you should shutoff the computer as soon as possible. With the drive off the chance of doing additional damage is decreased significantly. Now you have to decide- if the drive is very important and has valuable data which cannot be replaced is time to contact a professional drive recovery company. If the drive's data is something you would like to preserve but is not mission critical you are going to want to do two things- make sure it is, in fact, failing, and then transfer the data.
There are a number of ways to check and see if the disk is failing. While none of these are 100% accurate they can be helpful. Programs like fsck (Linux), chkdsk (DOS), and scandisk (Windows) are not specifically designed to find hardware problems, but they are useful for identifying bad sectors which may be indicative of bigger problems.
To access chkdsk's quick scan (no corrections made) Windows users simply need to:
Start > Run > type "cmd", press enter > type "chkdsk X:" (X being the drive letter
To access chkdsk's full scan with attempts to correct bad sectors Windows users need to:
Start > Run > type "cmd", press enter > type "chkdsk X: /R" (X being the drive letter
To access chkdsk's scan with attempts to correct file system errors Windows users need to:
Start > Run > type "cmd", press enter > type "chkdsk X: /F" (X being the drive letter
Aside from the Windows software tools, many drive manufacturers have their own programs which work well. Some of these are Western Digital's Data Lifeguard, Maxtor's Powermax, Seagate's Seatools. The manufacturer will ask you for the results of the respective program before you RMA a drive. There are also a number of aftermarket programs which will perform disk diagnostics. These don't really vary too much from one to another and can be found with just a little searching.