Typically, I will run a short scan before attempting hard drive recovery and a long scan after an initial recovery sweep. The “Long Generic” and “Short Generic” scans can be performed on any hard drive, regardless of manufacturer, and are extremely powerful in finding hardware issues with your drives. If you check the box all the way to the left of the drive you want to run a scan on, additional options such as the “generic” scans will appear in the drop down menus. These can be (P)ATA, SATA, SCSI, or USB drives. SeaTools is a free utility provided by Seagate and can be downloaded from the Seagate Website.Īfter loading the Seagate SeaTools software, you will see a list of hard drives that your computer has detected. data, but it’s hard to beat a utility made by one of the largest hard drive manufacturers, Seagate (I mean, c’mon, who knows hard drives better than those that create them). If you believe your computer may be experiencing hard drive failure or if you would just like to make sure the hard drive you use to store all of your data currently is in good shape, you should test your hard drive for errors! There are many free utilities out there that perform some basic tests or read the S.M.A.R.T.
