What's a good, preferably free, diagnostics program for Windows?

March 31, 2009 12:38 AM

What's a good, preferably free, diagnostics program for Windows?

I've been asked to look at a Windows laptop which had a hard disk crash recently. I want to do a low-level disk scan and general test of the electronics, like what Norton Disk Doctor et al for DOS used to do, but don't use Windows much any more and don't know what would be good. Does any one have any suggestions? (Free options preferred.)

posted by Grinder to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

I recently used SeaTools for DOS on my Windows XP machine. It was easy to use and fixed my disk problems. You can download it free at the middle of this page.
posted by various at 12:52 AM on March 31, 2009

Trinity Rescue Kit is what I generally use for this kind of job. It has smartmontools, GNU ddrescue and ntfs-3g preinstalled among other useful things.
posted by flabdablet's sock puppet at 1:07 AM on March 31, 2009

memtest 86 is an ancient and useful tool for certain things.
posted by 5imian at 1:53 AM on March 31, 2009

Best answer: I recommend HDTune for hard drives. It can do surface scans, performance testing, and read SMART error codes. Its free.
posted by damn dirty ape at 7:24 AM on March 31, 2009

Also, you'll want to use the built-in chkdsk for file system scanning/error correction.
posted by damn dirty ape at 7:25 AM on March 31, 2009

Ultimate Boot CD has a lot of diagnostic tools included. It's saved my butt more than a few times.
posted by aheckler at 7:37 AM on April 1, 2009