Help Diagnose Slow Disc Access

[Don Quixote de la Mancha]

All of the hard drive vendors provide disk drive diagnostic tools,
that are able to access vendor-specific - and undocumented - firmware
in their drives.  This diagnostic firmware is able to diagnose drive
hardware problems in a much more thorough way than the vendor-neutral
S.M.A.R.T. is able to.

These utilities are always provided in the form of DOS boot disk
images; one generally has a choice of making a floppy or a CD-ROM.

Some of the vendors also provide diagnostics that can run under
Windows.  But the advantage of the DOS boot disks (besides not having
to run Windows), is that you can test your boot drive without having
to disconnect it, and the test is performed on a completely quiescent
system.

The diagnostics are all quite easy to use.  Generally there is a
"short test" that just queries the diagnostic firmware, and a "long
test" that does a non-destructive test by reading every sector on your
drive.  Some of the diagnostics also include a "drive exerciser" which
tests the drive more rigorously by reading random sectors all over the
drive.

Finally they all have a destructive test, in which the diagnostic
writes zeroes to every sector of the drive.

No matter what, if you think one of your drives might be flaky, back
them both up at once, before doing anything else.

Being fully backed up also gives you the advantage that you can then
run the destructive sector-zeroing test.  I feel it's a good thing to
do in any case, just to "exercise the bits".

A while back I downloaded all the diagnostics from all the drive
vendors, and burned a CD for each one.  I also keep them around on a
filesystem where I archive all my software installers.  They're good
things to have on hand.

I realize that you're using a parallel cable.  But a note for anyone
else reading this, who wants to test an SATA drive.  Recent versions
of these utilities do support SATA, but they are only able to do so by
embedded device drivers for every SATA controller in existence, in an
executable that starts up from 16-bit DOS.

My experience with the use of these for SATA drives, is that the
diagnostics worked just fine for SATA controllers that were integrated
with the motherboard.  But when I tried to use a PCI SATA controller,
the diagnostic couldn't find the drive.  The vendor's tech support
just told me that they didn't support PCI SATA controllers, and that I
had to access SATA through the motherboard.

Hope That Help,

Don Quixote
-- 
Don Quixote de la Mancha
quixote at dulcineatech.com
http://www.dulcineatech.com

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