Examine IDE, SCSI and SATA disks
How fit is your hard drive? Drive Fitness Test (DFT) is a technology that uses a PC-based software program that accesses Hitachi hard drive microcode to enable diagnosis of hard drive operations. This is perfect if you think you've been suffering from hardware or hardrive failure.
DFT microcode automatically logs significant error events, such as hard drive errors and builds a history of all reassigned sectors. This log is kept in a special reserved area of the drive which you can then use for technical analysis by the manufacturer or technician. DFT microcode also performs a mechanical analysis of the hard drive in real time. Parameters such as disk shift, servo stability, and Repeatable Runout (RRO) are calculated by reading the servo's Position Error Signal (PES) and analyzing the patterns in the PES. This is an interesting new test for hard drives - the signals that control the actuator are also used to analyze the mechanical status of the disk stack.
DFT microcode also supports the creation and use of a special protected "diagnostic partition" on the media. This volume is a separate range of sector addresses that can be used to contain the DFT software and other diagnostic software.
If you have a Hitachi manufactured drive, this tool can help you diagnose difficult problems although without a certified technician to analyse the results, they won't mean much to you.
User reviews about IBM - Hitachi Drive Fitness Test
by Anonymous
Trojan is detected. .
And it tried to install some toolbar on my browser without authorization! Trojan virus is detected using Immunet protect.
by Anonymous
Excellent application.
Recently hard drive of my lenovo T61 crashed and I had a lot of important data in it. I took it to a professional data recovery team, which was not able to extract the data from the crashed drive. Then I read about this tool and used it. In a matter of one hour I had my whole hard drive restored. I dont know how to thank Hitachi for creating this amazing application. Kudos to Hitachi team :)
Pros:
1. Very easy to use tool
2. Very fast
3. Very detailed instruction manual
Cons:
1. Instead of bootable floppy diskette, files, it would be good if files for making a bootable USB is provided More