Hard disk initialization program wd. How to use one of the legendary hard drive diagnostic programs called Victoria! What you need to know about Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostic

There are several solutions for backing up data:

Built-in operating system applications. Microsoft Windows provides ways Reserve copy data that involves saving files and data on external or built-in storage media. All modern Windows versions already include the ability to back up necessary files or all hard drive, if necessary. Provided Windows features are complete and independent, and are aimed at ensuring that you do not need to use third party services or programs.
Copying data manually. You can always use the old proven way to back up data - manually copying data to an external storage medium. This is long, but if you work with a small amount of data, this solution may be quite acceptable for you.
Online services. Recently, the most modern way of backing up data has become increasingly popular - these are numerous online services. Companies that provide online backup of your files. A small background application installed on the computer creates copies of the necessary data and saves them to remote server. However, the volumes provided by such companies for storing your files in free version do not allow them to be used complete solution. Often the space offered for backing up data does not exceed 10 GB, so there is no need to talk about creating a backup copy of the entire hard drive. Such services are rather aimed at backing up a separate number of files.
Create a disk image. This is the most complete data backup solution for advanced users. This method involves the use third party program to create an image of the entire disk, which can be deployed if necessary on another storage medium. With this solution, you can in a short period of time get access to all the data that was on the disk at the time of its backup: documents, programs and media files.

WD (Western Digital) Hard Drive Models:

blue;
black;
Red Pro;
purple;
Purple NV;
Raptor;
VelociRaptor;
gold;

Released new version a proprietary utility for checking drives of our own production. DLDIAG is a rather small test for the Windows operating system. Capable of reading S.M.A.R.T. from supported models of hard drives and controllers (mainly standard ones), indicate critical parameter values, and also display information about the model (volume and firmware version).

Includes two tests (as well as a separate item for viewing detailed results) and the ability to overwrite the working area with zeros. The first one is fast, collects data on the state of S.M.A.R.T., as well as service information, by which it determines the degree of defectiveness and operability of the hard drive. As the test showed, it can be executed not only on drives manufactured by WD, but also on Samsung (although, most likely, on solutions from other manufacturers). The entire check takes about two minutes. The second test is extended, its duration can take from 30 minutes to an hour. It differs from fast only in the ability to detect bad sectors under operating systems of the 9x family and fix or isolate them (if possible).

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The function of filling data with zeros is intended for the complete destruction of data on the drive. Works in two modes: fast and long. The latter is more reliable in terms of destruction. Before using the program, it is recommended to do backup data to prevent their possible loss.

Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics

Download

Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics disk health check utility with IDE interface. The program does a good job, allowing you to return the disk to a state where defects did not yet exist. Immediately after launching the executable file and accepting the terms of the license, we are greeted with a window with disks installed in the system, including flash drives (see photo above). We click on the selected disk and we will see a window for selecting the desired tests.

The program will ask you to close all other active windows in order to avoid data loss. And I'm talking about all the buttons in order:

Quick test- Rapid testing (aka Express method). It speaks for itself and allows you to get information with a fairly high level of trust and disk status in a short time. for a more detailed analysis, go to the next paragraph.

extended test– Extended testing more accurately determines the state of the disk, so large disks will take a long time to pass it. If there are defects, the program may freeze in order to continue working again after a while. The test does not destroy the sample (hard drive), that is, it does not affect the disk surface until the user selects the bad sector recovery (repair) function.

Write Zeros- Writing zeros. The function can be used to clean operating systems or entire batches of files. The QUICK ERASE subfunction writes zeros in the first and last of the million sectors, the FULL ERASE subfunction puts zeros in all sectors of the disk, so you have to wait.

In today's article:

1. How to find out what condition my HDD or an SSD solid state drive, how long will it live. How to find out the health status of a used hard drive or SSD. What is S.M.A.R.T and what do its indicators say: Value, Worst, Raw, Threshold?

2. What are bad blocks? How to install - how many bad sectors (bad blocks) are on my hard drive, can they be fixed, and most importantly, how to fix it?

3. What should I do if the operating system does not boot or freezes even after reinstallation, and the hard drive makes clicks and extraneous sounds during operation? Why every time Windows boot running chkdsk disk check utility?

4. How to create bootable flash drive with the Victoria program and check the hard drive of a computer, laptop for bad blocks, even if it does not boot, and so on...

How to use one of the legendary hard drive diagnostic programs called Victoria!

Today's article is about the Victoria program. I'll say it with confidence this program the best among diagnostic and treatment utilities hard drives. This creation was developed by the sorcerer of the first category Sergey Kazansky.

I have been preparing for this article for a very long time and feeling grateful for this program. Victoria used to save seemingly already missing data on hard drives my clients, friends and acquaintances (often the master is NOT faced with the task of returning a faulty hard drive to normal operation, but only saving the data on it), and sometimes the hard drive itself was brought back to life!

I really wanted to write an article that would help novice users figure it out, and most importantly, they are not afraid of this program, but they are afraid of something, if you use the program carelessly, for example, start a thoughtless scan in Erase mode or even worse Write, then you can delete all the data on the screw, even if you come to your senses in time, you still bang boot record MBR and you will not be able to boot into the operating system next time.

Friends, it is impossible to put everything that I want to tell and show about the Victoria program in one article.. As a result of my efforts several articles:

Today's article. How to download and run directly from a working Windows program Victoria. What is S.M.A.R.T. or how to determine the health status of your hard drive or SSD in a couple of seconds. More articles...
How to fix a hard drive.

Firstly, there are two main versions of the Victoria program:

The first version will allow us to diagnose and repair hard drives directly in running Windows, but I want to say that it is possible to diagnose a hard drive using this version, but fixing bad sectors (remap) often ends in failure, and the likelihood of errors when working with Victoria directly "from Windows" is present, so many experienced users and professionals prefer the second version of the program.

The second version of the Victoria program will be located at boot disk or a flash drive, from this disk (flash drive) we will boot our desktop computer or laptop and also carry out diagnostics and, if necessary, treat the hard drive.

Note: The second version is very useful to many, since most users have one hard drive in a computer, or even more so in a laptop, in this case, you can boot from the Victoria disk (flash drive) and work with one single hard drive.

1. Victoria on the boot disk is very useful if you cannot start the operating system due to bad blocks.

2. If you have one hard drive and an operating system is installed on it and you run Victoria in the same operating system, then it will most likely refuse to fix bad sectors (bad blocks).

Many users will notice that often even Victoria will not fix a good bad, which can be answered like this - not all bads are of a physical nature (a broken sector on the hard disk), many bads are of a logical nature and can be easily fixed by this program.

Briefly, I will only say that physical bads (a physically destroyed sector) cannot be restored, but logical ones (software, sector logic errors) can be restored.

Friends, you can talk a lot, but there is a good proverb in life: "It is better to see once than hear a hundred times", so I will give you a few examples of the Victoria program.

Victoria to work from a boot drive

We go to the official website of the program and select the Victoria 3.5 Russian ISO image of the bootable CD-ROM.

We also need Victoria on the boot disk, but we will consider working with this version in the second place. If you do not have a floppy drive, then we will make a bootable USB flash drive with the Victoria program.

Victoria to work directly in operating system Windows XP, 7, 8, 10

We also download the version for Windows on my cloud.

We click on the downloaded archive of the program with the right mouse and select Extract files.

The files are extracted to the created vcr43 folder. We go into this folder and be sure to run it as administrator executable file victoria43.exe program.

Main program window Victoria

In the main window of the program, let's go through all the tabs superficially, and then in detail.

standard

Select the initial tab Standard. If you have several hard drives, then in the right part of the window, select the hard drive you need with the left mouse and immediately the passport data of our hard drive will be displayed in the left part of the window: where you were born and married, model, firmware, serial number, cache size, and so on. At the bottom is a log of our actions.

What is S.M.A.R.T.

Then we select the hard disk we need in the right part of the window, if you have several of them, and select it with the left mouse. Let's take a hard disk as an example. WDC WD5000AAKS-00A7B2(volume 500 GB).

Go to the SMART tab, press the button Get SMART, a message will appear to the right of the button GOOD and S.M.A.R.T. will open. hard drive of our choice.

S.M.A.R.T.(from the English self-monitoring, analysis and reporting technology) - an improved technology for self-monitoring, analysis and reporting of a hard drive developed in 1995 by the largest hard drive manufacturers.

In other words, friends, if you look at this window, you can find out what condition your hard drive is in.

Pay attention to the program Victoria highlighted in red (alarm!) the number 8 on the Raw value, the most important attribute for the health of the hard disk

5 Reallocated Sector Count - (remap), indicating the number of remapped sectors.

Note: The value of the Raw attribute is very important, read why.

In simple words, if the firmware built into the hard drive detects a bad sector (bad block), then it will reassign this sector as a sector from the backup track (the process is called remapping). But there are not an infinite number of spare sectors on the hard disk, and the program warns us that soon there will be nothing to reassign bad blocks, and this is fraught with data loss and we need to get ready to change the hard disk to a new one.

Looking ahead, I will say that in the next article we will try to heal this hard drive.

9 Power On time 14810, not highlighted in red, but I want to say that approaching the figure of 20,000 operating hours in most cases is associated with diseases and unstable hard disk operation.

Attributes are also highlighted:

196 Reallocation Event Count - 3 . The number of operations for reassigning bad blocks to sectors from backup tracks (remapping), both successful and unsuccessful operations are taken into account.

197 Current Pending Sector - 1 3. An indicator of the number of unstable sectors of real contenders for bad blocks. The hard disk firmware plans to replace these sectors in the future with sectors from the reserve area (remap), but there is still hope that in the future one of these sectors will be read well and will be excluded from the list of applicants.

198 Offline scan UNC sectors - 13 . The number of non-reassigned bads actually existing on the hard disk (possibly fixable having a logical structure - details later in the article).

199 UltraDMA CRC Errors - 63771. Errors that occur when transmitting information over external interface, the reason is a possibly twisted and poor-quality SATA cable and it needs to be replaced or a loose SATA connector on motherboard or on the hard drive itself. Or maybe the SATA 6 Gb / s interface hard drive itself is connected to the connector on the SATA 3 Gb / s motherboard, you need to reconnect it.

S.M.A.R.T attributes and their meanings. It's very important to know!

Attribute values

Val - the current value of the attribute, it should be high (up to 255), if the value of Val is equal to the critical Tresh or even less than it, then this corresponds to an unsatisfactory assessment of the parameter. For example, in our case, on a WDC WD5000AAKS-00A7B2 hard drive (500 GB, 7200 RPM, SATA-II), the Reallocated Sector Count attribute has the value Val-199 and the attribute Tresh(threshold) has a value of 140 , which is bad, but Val -199 is not yet equal to Tresh (threshold) 140 and we have time to copy data from this disk and retire it.

Wrst - the lowest value of the Val attribute for the entire time of the hard drive.

Tresh - the threshold value of the attribute, this value must be much lower than the value of Val (current value).

Raw - the "raw value" that will be converted to a value value the smaller this value, the better. An important indicator for evaluating the attribute , represents a real number, on the basis of which the Value value is formed, but exactly how the process of generating the Value value takes place is a proprietary secret of each hard drive manufacturer!

Decoding S.M.A.R.T.

Let's look at all the attributes of S.M.A.R.T, but I want to say that most often on "bad" hard drives, this Reallocated Sector Count attribute will be unsatisfactory. This is already a reason to be wary and test the surface of a hard drive or SSD (we will learn how to do this later in the article).

Friends, for an instant assessment of the health of the S.M.A.R.T hard drive, I use one more a simple program in Russian CrystalDiskInfo, be sure to download and install it yourself. In it, all the attributes are indicated in Russian!

http://crystalmark.info/download/index-e.html

Select Shizuku Edition (exe).

In this window, you can select the language of the program Russian.

As you can see, CrystalDiskInfo directly indicates to us (confirming Victoria's fears) that on the WDC WD5000AAKS-00A7B2 hard disk (capacity 500 GB) bad values of the attributes responsible for Reassigned sectors, Unstable sectors, Uncorrectable sector errors, highlighting them in yellow and indicating those . hard drive status in one word "Alarm"

What does the S.M.A.R.T of a failed hard drive look like?

But S.M.A.R.T of a failed hard drive WDC WD500BPVT laptop, which was brought to me for repair.

Victoria from Windows. Pay attention to the attribute:

5 Reallocated Sector Count (reassigned sectors), it has a value of Val -133 , and the attribute Tresh (threshold) has a value of 140 , this is unsatisfactory, since the value of Val -133 should not be less than the threshold value Tresh (threshold) 140 , that is, the number of bad sectors will grow, and there is nothing to reassign them, the spare sectors on the backup tracks have already ended.

197 Current Pending Sector - the indicator of the number of unstable sectors of real contenders for bad blocks has exceeded all possible limits.

And most importantly, self-assessment SMART status=BAD (unfit).

Program CrystalDiskInfo(download link above). We see the same thing, the Reallocated Sector Count attribute has a value of Val (current) -133, and the Tresh attribute (threshold) has a value of 140, the program rated those hard disk states as Bad.

this laptop is terribly slow, data cannot be copied from it, Windows cannot be reinstalled, the hard drive periodically disappears from the BIOS, that is, such a hard drive must be replaced without hesitation, even ours Victoria will not be able to completely cure such a screw, since healthy sectors on the backup tracks are over and there is nothing to reassign bad sectors, and copying data from it will be a real adventure for a week (I will definitely write an article about this).

Looking ahead, I’ll say that the test of this screw in the Victoria program showed the presence of 500 uncorrectable bad sectors (bad blocks).

DOS - version of the program Victoria.

Note: To make life easier for you, some hard drive diagnostic programs map each attribute, good or bad, to an icon color.

Green - the attribute of the hard disk corresponds to normal.

Yellow - indicates a slight discrepancy with the standard and it is better not to store important data on this screw, if you have Windows on such a hard drive, transfer it to an SSD.

Red - indicates a significant discrepancy with the standard and the hard drive had to be changed yesterday.

S.M.A.R.T of the same hard drive WDC WD500BPVT in the program HDDScan

Attributes

001 Raw Read Error Rate- error rate when reading information from a disk

002 Spinup Time- time to spin up disks to working condition

003 Start/Stop Count-total number of starts/stops of the spindle.

005 Reallocated Sector Count - (remap) indicates the number of remapped sectors. If the firmware built into the hard drive detects a bad sector (bad block), then it will reassign this sector as a sector from the backup track (the process is called remapping). But there are not an infinite number of spare sectors on the hard disk, and the program warns us that soon there will be nothing to reassign bad blocks, and this is fraught with data loss and we need to get ready to change the hard disk to a new one

007 Seek Error Rate- the frequency of errors in positioning the block of heads, a constantly growing value, indicates an overheating of the hard drive and an unstable position in the basket, for example, it is poorly fixed.

009 Power-on Hours Count- the number of hours spent in the on state.

010 Spin Retry Count- the number of repeated spins of the disk to the operating speed if the first one fails.

012 Device Power Cycle Count-Number of complete disk on-off cycles

187 Reported Uncorrectable Error- Errors that the hard drive firmware could not recover using its own methods of fixing errors with hardware, the consequences of overheating and vibration.

189 High Fly Writes- the recording head was above the surface higher than necessary, which means that the magnetic field was insufficient for reliable recording of the media. The reason is vibration (shock).

For laptops, this figure is slightly higher.

190 Important parameters regarding temperature. It is important that the temperature does not rise above 45 degrees.

194 HDA Temperature- temperature of the mechanical part of the hard drive

195 Hardware ECC Recovered-number of bugs that were fixed by the hard drive itself.

196 Reallocation Event Count- The number of operations for reassigning bad blocks to sectors from backup tracks (remapping), both successful and unsuccessful operations are taken into account.

197 Current Pending Errors Count- uncorrectable sector errors, also an important parameter, the number of sectors, the reading of which is difficult and is very different from reading a normal sector. That is, the hard disk controller could not read these sectors the first time, usually soft bads belong to these sectors, they are also called software or logical bad blocks (sector logic error) - when writing user information to the sector, service information is also written , namely the ECC sector checksum (Error Correction Code), it allows you to recover data if they were read with an error, but sometimes this code is not written, which means that the sum of user data in the sector does not match the ECC checksum. For example, this happens when the computer is suddenly turned off due to power failures, because of this, information was written to the hard disk sector, but there is no checksum.

Logical bad blocks cannot be fixed by simple formatting, since when formatting, the hard disk controller will first try to read information from the bad sector, if it fails (in most cases), then no overwriting will occur and the bad block will remain bad block. You can correct the situation in the Victoria program, it will forcefully enter information into the sector (heal the sector), then read it, compare the ECC checksum and the bad block will become a normal sector. More details about all types of bad blocks in our article How to check a hard drive.

198 Offline scan UNC sectors- The number of unreassigned bads actually existing on the hard disk (possibly fixable having a logical structure - details later in the article).

198 Uncorrectable Errors Count- the number of uncorrected errors when accessing the sector, indicating surface defects.

Reported Uncorrectable Errors- shows the number of uncorrected bad sectors.

199 UltraDMA CRC Errors- the number of errors that occur when transmitting information via the external interface, the reason is a twisted and poor-quality SATA cable, it may need to be changed.

200 Write Error Rate- the frequency of errors that occur when writing to a hard drive, this indicator is usually used to judge the quality of the surface of the drive and its mechanical part.

202 Data Address Mark Errors- I haven’t seen a decryption anywhere, literally an address marker data error, it can mean something that only the manufacturer of this hard drive knows.

How to quickly check the hard drive or SSD for suitability for work?

And we look at S.M.A.R.T, as we see, the hard drive is almost in perfect condition, although it has already worked for 8000 hours (parameter 9 Power-On Time)

Victoria

Hard drive surface test!

In the right part of the program window, check the Ignor item and the read item and click Start. This will run a simple hard disk surface test without error correction. This test will not bring any negative and positive effects on the hard drive, but after the test is over, you will know what condition your hard drive is in..

The test results are excellent. Not a single block with a delay of more than 30 ms!

CrystalDiskInfo

SAMSUNG HD403LJ hard drive (372 GB) from a recent article

It had bad blocks and I had to transfer Windows 8 from it to an SSD, after a successful transfer, the owner (my classmate) gave me this screw and Victoria soon brought it back to life after "writing all over the clearing" (Write algorithm). The former owner refused to take the cured hard drive.

The test results are slightly worse. 3 blocks with a delay of more than 200 ms and 1 block with a delay of 600 ms (possibly a candidate for bad).

Not quite serviceable hard drive MAXTOR STM3250310AS (250 GB, 7200 RPM, SATA-II) it is 8 years old (veteran) and it still works, though I save it, I store only files of unimportant data on it.

Although there are no obvious bads on it, we see that the attribute 5 Reallocated Sector Count - (remap), denoting the number of remapped sectors critical and soon there will be nothing to reassign bads.

9 Power on time - total number of hours worked by the hard drive 23668 , this is a lot, usually problems with hard drives begin after 20,000 hours of working.

Also, the unimportant attribute 199 UltraDMA CRC Errors - 63771, errors that occur when transmitting information via the external interface, the reason is a low-quality SATA cable and it needs to be replaced (this is not always the case).