How to use the mhdd program. We check and repair a hard drive with MHDD
MHDD is a multifunctional program for accurate diagnosis and repair of hard drives.
The program is completely free and provides great practicality and reliability of scanning.
MHDD performs a high-quality disk check for various damages, including bads and so-called soft bads.
One of the most important advantages of the program is that it works with the hard drive at a low level, directly through the IDE controller ports.
The main features of the application are as follows:
Accurate diagnostics of the mechanical surface of the disc.
. monitoring IDE controller registers.
. high-quality use of the HPA function (reducing the volume of the hard drive).
. adjusting the noise emitted by the hard drive.
. Error logging.
. the presence of a function for completely destroying data on the hard drive without the possibility of recovery.
. HDD testing under extreme conditions.
. possibility of simultaneous testing of several hard drives.
. working with a password system on disk.
MHDD
This article was written for those who are interested and taking their first steps in the field of hard drives and is dedicated to the MHDD program and working with it.
At the time of writing, the latest version of the program was 2.9.
First of all, it should be noted that the program is universal; it works with all drives with an ATA interface, regardless of manufacturer and model.
This is explained by the fact that any interaction of an ATA hard drive with the outside world occurs through a standard set of ports and using a specific set of commands defined in the ATA standard specification (when developing all versions of which, compatibility considerations were taken into account, and thus it becomes completely unimportant which version of the interface equipped with this particular drive, and even more so the manufacturer, because when developing the drive he certainly had to be guided by the ATA standard).
The program is capable of running under pure DOS, and directly from Windows (95/98/ME).
True, when working from Windows, there are some restrictions (they are mentioned in the documentation: in this case, the drive does not need to be defined in the BIOS, and the controller on which it is installed in Windows is better disable everything).
And although this option is workable, I personally still prefer to work under pure DOS, since even if everything works stably in Windows, the speed indicators obtained may not correspond to reality.
And then, Windows is still Windows...
Maybe I’m paranoid, but in “Varez” matters I try to stay away from “Windows”.
And since we mentioned controllers, it must be said that the program allows you to work with drives installed on external ATA controllers, but not in all versions.
This feature was announced in version 2.8, but version 2.9 available on the website does not have this feature.
The utility can be launched from any non-write-protected media that has some space for recording temporary files and work logs (minimum 70 KB required, 20 MB recommended).
Do not use the program from the same disk that you are diagnosing and treating, if it happens that you have only one drive (you are restoring bad things on your own and only one, for example) - use the program from a floppy disk.
The hardware part is your test machine, the program is not occupied at all: it can be anything, with an ATA controller, up to 286 (the documentation says so, I haven’t tried it myself, since I only have 386 available, but in theory it should) .
After startup, if there is more than one drive in the system, we are prompted to select the one we want to work with.
A hint about the main commands of the program will be displayed on the screen.
Having initialized the selected drive by clicking, we get comprehensive information about it:
Model name; logical disk geometry (logical number of cylinders/heads/sectors per track);
- serial number; microcode version;
- number of blocks addressed via LBA;
- supported ATA functions and maximum supported mode; SMART status (whether it is enabled);
- security system status (hardware password enabled/disabled);
- full size of the hard drive; the result of passing the main tests.
Some of this information is displayed in the second line from the top on the screen and is visible during operation.
In addition, the status of the disk and its use at a given time is indicated by indicators in the very top line.
They carry the following information:
BUSY- the drive is busy and does not respond to commands;
WRFT- recording error;
DREQ- the drive wants to exchange data with the outside world;
ERR- an error occurred as a result of some operation.
When this bit lights up, look at the top right of the screen.
The type of the last error will be displayed there: (valid only when the “ERR” light is on):
AMNF- Address Mark Not Found - Addressing a specific sector failed.
The likely cause is damage to this sector, damage to its identification fields (this is mentioned here).
But immediately after turning on the drive, on the contrary, it indicates the absence of problems and reports the successful completion of internal diagnostics;
T0NF- Track 0 Not Found - zero track was not found;
ABRT- Abort, command rejected;
IDNF- Sector ID Not found;
UNCR- Uncorrectable Error - Error not corrected by ECC code.
There is probably a logical bad block in this place (this was discussed here).
In addition to these, two more indicators may light up at the top - P.W.D.- signaling the installed hardware password, and HPA- if the drive size was changed using the “HPA” command (usually used to hide bad blocks at the end of the disk).
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HDD ( HDD) is one of the main components of any computer, because this is where the operating system is loaded. Therefore, the role of such a device cannot be overestimated. Exactly from work hard drive depends on system stability and data reading speed. However, as happens with other components, the hard drive can also fail at any time, which brings a lot of inconvenience to any user. There can be quite a few reasons for this, and such a device is not always repairable. But there is still the possibility of restoring the hard drive. Therefore, if you encounter such a problem, the first thing you should do is not run to the computer store and buy a new hard drive.
One of the best programs, which is capable of restoring a hard drive that has been considered MHDD for many years now. Every user can understand its work, which is why it has gained immense popularity. But this is not the main thing. In most cases, it really helps to restore a hard drive, and you don’t even have to pay anyone for it.
Description of the MHDD program.
MHDD is one of the most common programs that will help diagnose, as well as hard restoration disk. You can download it on various sites, and this can be done absolutely free, which also cannot but please users. First of all, it is worth noting that this program is suitable for most HDD interfaces, including SATA, IDE, SCSI, USB.The first version of MHDD appeared back in 2000, and the developers were Russian specialists. At that time, the program could scan the surface of a hard drive with an IDE interface. Today, using MHDD, you can perform not only diagnostics, but also many other useful functions, including:
- reading or writing arbitrary sectors of the hard drive;
- SMART system control;
- removal of poorly performing sectors;
- cleaning the hard drive;
- changing the hard drive capacity;
- system password management;
- reduction of noise during operation of the device. This significantly reduces the speed of the HDD;
- hard drive test under maximum load.
The main advantage of such a program is its speed. You can run diagnostics and check your hard drive for errors in a very short period of time. Also among the advantages of MHDD is the ability to run the program from any storage medium, be it a floppy disk, disk or USB drive.
How does MHDD work?
The first step to launch this program is to go into the BIOS, where you need to change the system boot method. You need to boot from the device where you have the program itself, that is, from a disk, floppy disk or USB drive. This is done very simply, you just need to install the device you need in the First Boot Device item. For example, if you need to boot from a CD-ROM, it will look like this:After this, save all changes and reboot the system. This will launch the MHDD program, which will first of all display a message whether the ADAPTEC drivers need to be loaded. For most cases, you don't need to download them. Therefore, select the appropriate item and proceed to the next step.
The program will give you information about the number of sectors that are on your hard drive.
The hard drive will also be assigned a specific channel number, which will be necessary for further work with MHDD. You will need to enter this number, after which you can begin working with the hard drive.
After this, you will be able to find out all the information about the hard drive, as well as get acquainted with the basic commands that will be needed to work with MHDD. To do this, you will need to press F2 and F1 respectively. Next, you can start scanning your hard drive by entering the name of the command (Scan), after which you will see this menu in front of you:
At the same time, you can start checking your hard drive, indicating from which sector and for which sector you need to perform diagnostics. You enter this data in the first two lines of the menu. All other points can be left unchanged. After this, you can start running the scan and identifying bad sectors of the hard drive; to do this, press the F4 key. It will also sometimes be useful to change the menu last point from Off to On. This is necessary if you have suspicions that the system itself mistakenly classifies some sectors as bad. It is almost impossible for ordinary users to determine this. With this scan, all sectors where read delays are detected will be erased.
After this, you will see the following picture in front of you, where it will happen hard check disk:
The column on the right will display the number of blocks that are read from at different speeds, respectively, at speeds of up to 3, up to 10, up to 50, up to 150, up to 500 and more than 500 milliseconds. An indicator of up to 150 milliseconds is considered normal. The presence of the symbols “x” and “s” indicate bad sectors of the hard drive.
The hard drive scan will take up to several hours. Everything directly depends on the size of the hard drive. After this, you will be given information about how many bad sectors were detected on the hard drive. And only after that you can begin to eliminate them. This is why the Erase Delays and Remap functions exist, which marks all bad areas of the disk and does not access them in the future. It is recommended to run Erase Delays. This way you can remove all software failures of the hard drive. And after checking using this function, you can start launching with the Remap function enabled. This way you can restore all possible areas of the hard drive and remove all bad sectors from it. Information that was located in bad sectors will be deleted.
If their number is very large, then, of course, working with such a hard drive in the future will be quite problematic due to the slow speed of reading information from it. But even this can be fixed by completely formatting the disk. In this case, the system will mark bad sectors as areas in which information does not need to be written. Accordingly, the volume of the hard drive will decrease, but you will still be able to work with it successfully.
Conclusion.
As you can see, it is still possible to restore your hard drive yourself. The MHDD program would be ideal for this. Understanding its work, as you already understood, is quite simple. Therefore, if you suddenly encounter a hard drive failure, you can use MHDD. The whole procedure will not take much of your time, and the result will pleasantly surprise you. You will find more information about data recovery in the section of the same name. Purpose of the programThe Victoria program is designed for testing various drives: HDD, flash, RAID arrays, and also allows you to hide HDD surface defects, if such a possibility exists. The author of the program is Sergey Kazansky, it is distributed free of charge, you can download it 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 under test. PIO mode requires chipset support motherboard. Modern systems younger than approximately 2011 do not support this mode of program operation, so we will not describe it. Let's bring short description control elements in tabs.
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 also be tested. Selecting a device for testing is done by clicking on the desired item. Immediately on the left in the Drive ATA passport window, information about the selected device is displayed. Seek, Acoustic management & 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, the SMART is read. USB drives are not supported. The remaining buttons SMART ON, SMART OFF, Auto save attributes ON/OFF allow you to enable/disable SMART monitoring and save the read attributes.
Test. The main tab that we will work with in the future. The Start LBA/End LBA windows specify the beginning and end of the tested area. By default, the entire disk is tested. Pause – pauses the test, the value changes to Continue. Start – starts the selected test, changes the value to Stop – stops the test. Diamond with green arrows - moving forward or backward along the surface of the disk. Block size – the size of the block of sectors read at a time; you can leave it alone. Timeout – time after which, if there is no response from the drive, the program will move to the next sector. End of test – what to do at the end of the test: stop the disk, start the test over again, turn off the disk or turn off the computer. The color scale shows the number of blocks with the specified reading time. Switches Verify, Read, Write – 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 – mode of working with bad blocks. Ignore - skip. Remap – attempt to perform the procedure of reassigning a sector from the reserve. Restore – attempts to read data and write it back (does not work on modern disks >80GB). Erase – an attempt to write to a damaged sector. It can correct it if an incorrect check sum (CRC) is written to the sector. > - test execution forward.<- 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 using the View part data button. MBR ON/OFF buttons enable/disable the ability to recognize partitions in operating system.
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. Here he is.
We see that the program interprets it as bad. Let's take a closer look.
Attribute 5 Reallocated sector count – number of reassigned sectors 1287 - the disk “crumbles”.
Attribute 197 Current pending sectors – the number of candidate sectors for reassignment; if the 5th attribute is full, it indicates that the disk is “crumbling”, the surface is quickly degrading.
This means that if you need data from a disk, you need to copy it immediately, and not try to repair such a disk. The actions that we will consider next can lead to the loss of information.
You can see errors like UNCR - these are bad, unreadable sectors - bad blocks.
You can uncheck the Grid checkbox, then a disk reading graph will be displayed. In places where there are bad spots, speed dips are visible, marked in red.
At the end of the test, you can try to hide the bad sectors by selecting the Remap mode. This can help if there are bads, but SMART does not yet have BAD status. It looks like this:
The result of the remap can be viewed by reading the smart disk. Here he is:
The value of the 5th attribute increased and became 1291. During normal operation, disks, in the absence of access to them, launch their own procedures for checking and reassigning sectors in the background, and the number of candidates for remap, numbering in the hundreds, indicates that the disk can no longer maintain condition condition and must be replaced. And the SMART status does not always adequately describe the condition of the disk - it can be severely damaged, and the SMART status is displayed as GOOD.
Before issuing this command, the UNLOCK command must be issued.
RPM Change spindle speed(this procedure is not guaranteed to work)
FF Write disk sectors. The data to be recorded is taken from the specified file
A.A.M. Configure the noise characteristics of the drive
MAKEBAD Generation of BAD blocks. Does not work on all drives
RANDOMBAD Generation of bad blocks, scattering them randomly across the surface
INIT Reset and recalibration
FDISK Make one partition for the entire disk. Only MBR changes
SMART / Control the SMART system and view attributes
STOP / Stop spindle
I/ Send ID commands, then INIT
ERASE Selectively erase sectors or completely erase a surface (low-level formatting)
To erase directly, bypassing the BIOS, you can disable the disk in BIOS settings, or erase with the parameter /DISABLEBIOS.This parameter does not affect the erasing speed.
FASTERASE Surface erasing at maximum speed (password system is used)
TOF Reading disk sectors to a file
If you bought a new hard drive (HDD) or there is a suspicion that your old HDD is no longer the same, I strongly recommend checking it for bad problems.
Bad, bad, bad sector, bad block– (from English “ bad” – bad) – faulty, unreadable, unreliable, unreliable file, disk sector.
- Official website of Mhdd (in Russian)
- Download latest version iso image (at the time of writing this article, version 4.6) mhdd32ver4.6iso
I'll bring you step by step instructions on HDD testing using a program example MHDD. The program, with the proper skill and experience, gives a chance to correct some bad things, out of ignorance it’s better not to try to fix anything!!!. But checking the serviceability of the disk is quite simple and painless, and I will write about this.
How does scanning work?
- MHDD sends the command VERIFY SECTORS with number LBA(sector number) and sector number as parameters
- The drive raises the flag BUSY (disk is blocked)
- MHDD starts the timer (the timer measures the time the disk was blocked, i.e. when it was BUSY or in Russian - busy!)
- After the drive has executed the command, it lowers the flag BUSY
- MHDD calculates the time spent by the drive and displays the corresponding block on the screen ( tabular part on the right ). If an error occurs ( bad block), the program displays the corresponding letter that describes the error.
MHDD repeats steps 1-5 until the final sector.
How to understand the scan results?
The presence of red ( >500ms) blocks on a completely healthy drive is unacceptable. I sound the alarm when green blocks appear (< 150ms ). You can try to fix these blocks by erasing the entire surface of the disk (naturally, all data will be lost) and, if this does not help, you can do conclusions(the drive is no longer reliable enough).
Alphabetic blocks indicate the presence of BAD blocks on the surface.
Deciphering mhdd errors:
- UNC(Uncorrectable Data Error) – It was not possible to correct the data with redundant code, the block was declared unreadable. It can be either a consequence of a data checksum violation or a consequence of physical damage to the HDD;
- ABRT(Aborted Command) – hdd rejected the command as a result of a malfunction, or the command is not supported HDD data(perhaps a password is set, the model is outdated or too new...).
- IDNF(ID Not Found) – The sector is not identified. Usually it indicates the destruction of the microcode or lower-level format of the HDD. On working hard drives, this error is displayed when trying to access a non-existent address (the problem is that modern sector headers do not always have sector headers);
- AMNF(Address Mark Not Found) - it is impossible to read the sector, usually as a result of a serious hardware problem (for example, on a Toshiba, Maxtor HDD - indicates a malfunction of the magnetic heads);
- T0NF(Track 0 Not Found) – it is impossible to recalibrate to the starting cylinder of the working area. On modern HDDs it indicates a malfunction of the microcode or magnetic heads;
- BBK(Bad Block Detected) – A bad block has been found. The error is outdated;
More information about these errors can be found in the description of the ATA standard on the website www.t13.org (but finding the required document there is a tedious task).
