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There are some nice and useful utilities for testing disks for bad blocks like MHDD, Victoria, HITACHI Drive Feature Tool etc. But these utilities have some limitations.

For example, MHDD is the best utility I've ever seen for both surface diagnostic and repair:

  • it can sometimes fix sectors which were mistakingly marked as bad (soft "bad"s)
  • it finds other read errors (sectors with long read time for example)
  • it works with host protected area which used on some non Apple notebooks
  • it allows to erase whole disk or only areas with slow access time (which sometimes 'heals' them)
  • it allows to
  • during surface scan it shows access time:

MHDD main screen

But it has some serious issues:

  • it's dos utility so it's tricky to use on Mac (but it's possible)
  • it may not work with Intel SATA controllers,
  • you may need to put the HDD in an external enclosure to make the utility see that drive.
  • latest version is dated 2006 and it's probably abandoned by author

Please recommend a utility which can be used to repair and check a disk (HDD, SSD, flash drive, etc.), find bad blocks and other surface problems. Can your utility check the entire disk surface, including the system partition?

Of course there are official warranty and authorized service centers, but software like this is always useful anyway (for example in a case of void warranty).

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2 Answers 2

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Drive Genius

A personal favorite of mine, Drive Genius will do everything you're looking for with style. It's also used by the Apple Store folks, just so you know.

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  • Thanks. I found that even Demo can check drive for bad sectors.
    – Alex Bolotov
    Apr 1, 2012 at 15:26
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There's also

Alsoft Disk Warrior

which can repair Mac OS disk directory corruption. It's often a useful "first step" before you go to something like Drive Genius.

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