Hard Drive diagnostic tests?

I am checking a very slow computer for a friend and ran some hard drive diagnostic tests off of a live cd. It passed most tests, including the S.M.A.R.T tests. However it did fail the butterfly seek test and the read/write test. I was wondering what do those failures mean? Does the hdd need to be replaced? Could this be why the computer is so slow?

 

Hi,

You might want to run the HD manufacturer's diagnostic. The long test should tell you if the HD is having problems. The read/write test does just that it randomly reads and writes to areas of the drive and then trys to read it back. If it has problems reading too many spots on the HD then the drive fails the test.

Try the manf. test and see what it says. http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287 If it says it is OK then I would ignore the other test you ran and look elsewhere for the cause of the slowness. Is it a PC or a laptop?

 

Thanks, it is a laptop. Fairly new one too.

 

HD is probably a good guess. New HD can fail just as a percentage of manufactured units.

You could aslo run a Windows chkdsk if the HD passes but now I'm thinking it could be the HD as they sometimes fail in the first year if they are going to go.

BTW, I didn't say but you can tell the make of the HD by going to Computer and right-clicking the C: drive and select Properties. It will show the model number of the HD under the Hardware tab. The tools tab will have Error Checking where you can schedule the chkdsk. The first box is sufficient to look for any corruption in the file system. The second box looks for bad sectors on the HD. If you run the longer test check the results for an files in Bad Sectors. That would be an indication it is the HD causing the problems.

It will just be a single line in the results: http://www.modernstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/how-to-run-chkdsk.jpg