Utility to report bad hard drives

[xyrx]

Our company has had a 37% - 39% hard drive failure rate on our D600 Dell laptops, which obviously is way too high. Yes, some are probably due to mishandling, but a majority is happing on laptops that are never removed from their docking station, so... I can't see how it would be mishandled.

Anyway, we are about to start doing full-drive encryption on every laptop in our organization, by deploying the encryption software in Windows. My worry is, when this encryption software hits bad sectors on the drive, or the drive controller has issues, the encryption will stop right in the middle, leaving the entire drive useless.

I would like to have a utility run (command line or GUI, as long as the GUI program can be automated) on each of our Windows XP Professional workstations, do a full drive scan, and log any problems to a network share. I ran a chkdsk /f on the c: drive of one of our laptops, and after the chkdsk ran during startup, there was no entry in the event viewer under application showing the results.

Anyone have any suggestions on FREE utilities to do this? Or maybe another method of testing each hard disk remotely like this? Thanks.

 

[captaincrunch00]

Laptops have a very high rate of failure for hard drives. I have 2 dozen laptops, and in the 4 years I've been here, I've replaced 15 hard drives in laptops and 1 in a desktop.

I dont know of any way to do what you want, but the main problem with the laptops is the fans stop working and no one notices, then the drives overheat and become junk after a short while.
Make sure the fans are running on these things, have the users hold their hands behind it and feel for hot air being blown back.

 

[chipk]

I'm with Captaincrunch00 - it's probably overheating. I support lots of Dell C and D series laptops on my network, and we haven't seen many hard drive failures. Our environment is controlled fairly well with AC, though.

 

[bcastner]

You can purchase very inexpensive utilities for S.M.A.R.T. monitoring of your drives.

Most will accomodate logging, email notification to the supervisor, and SMS text messaging.

Google "xp smart drive utilities"

To use a freeware utility for logging, maybe something like this. Create a folder somewhere called Disk_logs. I will place it on computer Bill Castner and share it to EVERYONE will full priviliges.

I will use this freeware:

http://www.beyondlogic.org/solutions/smart/smart.htm

You can add to your logon script, use Task Scheduler for an 'at Logon' scheduled task or some other means of deploying this.

\\billcastner\Disk_logs\smart.exe >\\billcastner\Disk_logs\%COMPUTERNAME%.LOG

 

[linney]

Try these, see if they help with ChkDsk.

Try the L switch from a command prompt.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/chkdsk.mspx

Use the view / filter option and search for Winlogon in the Event Viewer (Application Folder).

http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/58895.html

 

[bcastner]

To run chkdsk on a fixed disk, you must be a member of the Administrators group.