Free hard drive monitoring utility - Hard Drive Monitor

A free hard drive diagnostic tool, Hard Drive Monitor, is going to perform ongoing testing and performance verification for all hard drives in your computer. It will show you one detailed report about your hard drives health condition, including drive status, all useful information, spin-up time, drive temperature and more, all updated in real time. Utility will also show one hard drive thermometer in your PC desktop tray, giving you the information visible and handy so you will be able to predict your Hard Drives failures and act preventively upon to secure your important data.

Key program features

1. Tiny monitoring utility, use a small amount of resources itself;
2. No need install, you can launch it from one USB Flash disk;
3. Show you drive temperature in real time (run as a little icon in your system tray);
4. Support multi hard drives;
5. Free tool, freeware and easy to use;
6. Support all Windows OS, include Windows Vista 64bits and Windows 7;
   

Why you need one Hard Drive Monitor?

Vast majority of the PC users are saving the most important files and data on their hard disks, as the most reliable types of permanent storage. This utility is designed to take care of these hard drives, supporting reading and monitoring S.M.A.R.T. data.

While you run some big data operations on your disk for a long time, your hard drive will eventually heat up. Once the drive temperature rises over certain critical point, the drive operation becomes dangerous. This program by any means is not data recovery software, but it can help you to monitor all your hard disks, and react quickly before you may experience hardware failure. It is a free and handy HDD diagnostic utility for your everyday use.

About S.M.A.R.T.

S.M.A.R.T. is acronym for "Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology" (sometimes written as SMART). It allows monitoring computer hard disks to detect and report on various indicators of reliability. All major Hard Drives manufacturers support one or more S.M.A.R.T. attributes in various products, such as Samsung, Seagate, Hitachi (HGST), Fujitsu, Maxtor (purchased by Seagate), and Western Digital.

Author’s website: http://harddrivemonitor.com/

Direct downloading link: http://harddrivemonitor.com/harddrivemonitor.exe

Scanning Hard Drive for Read Errors

Disk Scanner is a tiny freeware utility to check the hard drive for read errors. Sometimes, you may notice, that some files on the disk cannot be read. This may happen for several reasons, but the most important one is the hard drive degradation, that may be the first typical sign of the disk failure. In the course of investigation, you might need to disseminate the problem appearance, seeking for the real source of the troubles. By scanning your disk you can clearly see a possible direction for the further drive troubleshooting and repair.

Note that Disk Scanner makes a read only scan of the disk clusters and shows results as an image with bad clusters marked. The utility does not offer the errors correction ability.

Key Features

• Read-only test of hard drive volumes for read errors
• Scan hard disk, flash drives, USB hard drives, CD/DVD, floppy
• Ariolic Disk Scanner does not require a setup - it's portable. Run it directly from CD or a Flash drive
• See the check result at a glance
• Works with hard drives, flash disks, CD, floppy
• Nice and simple user interface
• and many more...

System Requirements

- Pentium 233 MHz or higher processor
- Minimum 128 MB of RAM Memory (256 MB recommended)
- Minimum 2 MB available hard disk space
- IE 5.5 or higher
- Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003/Vista

Website: http://www.ariolic.com/disk-scanner.html

Author: Ariolic Software (Developer of ActiveSMART shareware).

Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD)

What is Ultimate Boot CD?

Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) is a bootable CDROM for PCs, allowing users to run floppy-based diagnostic tools from most CDROM drives on Intel-compatible machines, no operating system required. The CD includes many diagnostic utilities for troubleshooting and resolving problems on your computer, managing your hard disk partitions (including creating, resizing, copying, moving, etc), imaging or cloning your hard disk partitions, resetting your forgotten password on NT, Win2k, or XP, scanning your hard disks for viruses, etc. and can also be used to provide shared internet access or browse the Web.

When do you need Ultimate Boot CD?

You need the Ultimate Boot CD if you want to: 

• Run floppy-based diagnostic tools from CDROM drives. More and more PCs are shipped without floppy drives these days, and it is such a royal pain when you need to run diagnostic tools on them.
• Free yourself from the slow loading speed of the floppy drive. Even if you do have a floppy drive, it is still much faster to run your diagnostic tools from the CDROM drive, rather than wait for the tool to load from the floppy drive.
• Consolidate as many diagnostic tools as possible into one bootable CD.
• Run Ultimate Boot CD from your USB memory stick. A script on the CD prepares your USB memory stick so that it can be used on newer machines that support booting from USB devices.

Main Features:

Ultimate Boot CD contains tons of free utilities enabling you to:

• Reset a password in windows 2000/XP.
• Diagnose a Hard Disk to test if it's still good.
• Copy a partition to a new partition on a new Hard Drive.
• Completely wipe out a Hard Disk by zeroing out all data.
• Run a plethora of memory testing utilities.
• Run a few Linux rescue disks.
• Get detailed hardware report of computer system.
• Run a virus scanner on an infected system.

Web Site: http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/ or http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/index.html

Download Page: http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/download.html or http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html