How to Test a Hard Drive

Programs for Checking Your Hard Drive

There's a number of different programs that you can use to error check your hard drive.  All the major hard drive vendors like Seagate and Western Digital have them.  Windows has a good one built right into the operating system and that's the one that we're going to demonstrate for you now.

Steps for Checking Your Hard Drive

To check your hard drive for errors, open up your My Computer.  The My Computer icon can be on your desktop, over here, where you can also find it from your start menu.  Click on Computer and you'll see a list of all of your hard drives.  The hard drive you're going to want to check most often is your C drive, also known as the local disc.  Right click on it, you'll see the popup menu.  Go down to properties.  That brings up this window here.  Select the tools tab and the first option is error checking.

Options When Checking Your Hard Drive

When you click the check now box, you'll see 2 options.  One to automatically fix file system errors and the other to scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors.  If you select the option to automatically fix file system errors, it's going to prompt you to schedule the check for the next time that you boot your computer and that's because it needs exclusive access to your computer and nothing else can be running.
We will switch those options so we can show you how it runs now.  Click Start and you'll see the progress bar.  Error checking is now error checking your hard drive.  This will take a variable amount of time depending on the size of your hard drive and the number of files that need to be checked.  If you got a large hard drive and a good number of files, this can take an hour or even longer.
That's how you test the computer's hard drive.  For more information, visit About.com.