10/12/2020 Mhdd Not Detecting Drive
Jun 15, 2012 Everything was going great and I got the recovery disk to install, but my problem was the Hard drive wasn't showing up as unallocated disk space. The drive did show up, but not as any free space. I tried to do some tutorials in diskpart to fix the drive, but to no avail. Now, I can't even get windows, or BIOS to detect the drive. It still is not working, and now it isnt found with the windows 7 disk I have. This isnt a new pc. It was working at some point, but I stupidly formatted the hard drive and have no drivers for my hitachi hard drive. I bought a new seagate barraccuda, but now that hard drive is unallocated and also is not detected. Jul 21, 2020 Case 4SSD not showing up because of disk driver issues. Just like a hard drive, most times the SSD is detected but not showing up in My Computer because the disk driver is not installed properly. So, you can try to reinstall the SSD driver to check if it can help to fix the issue. Step 1: Right-click on This PC, select Manage. Under the System. Jan 11, 2011 However, MHDD only detects the CD ROM. I tried running MHDD again with CD drive pulled out from the laptop, but no luck, MHDD does not detect the drive I tried to connect this hitachi drive to a Lenovo T61p but as expected, it asked me for a boot up password and did not accept the password that normally would be accepted in the Toshiba.
In this article we’ll discuss how to check your hard disk for bad sectors with HDAT2 application and MHDD will be also mentioned in the bonus section.
In our previous article regarding computer hardware identification you saw that with HWiNFO application you can access SMART info of your hard drive and see possible errors on your disk; with additional scanning for bad sectors, you have a whole picture of your hard disk’s health.
I use HDAT2 very often to check my hard disks for bad sectors, because that’s reliable software, with fair hard disk scanning speed, and it’s feature-rich, as well. I also use MHDD, which also a reliable tool if it discovers you hard drive; in my test today based on 4 computers, it managed to detect just one hard disk… Anyway, I recommend you to try both tools to see what functionalities they provide.
Note that these programs in this article don’t run on the active operating system but load before it; so, in this article we’ll describe these steps:
In the bonus section, we’ll mention MHDD and Ultimate Boot CD (ubcd) that contains (besides MHDD and HDAT2) various software used for repairing, restoring, and diagnosing many computer problems.
Download these apps:
HDAT2: http://www.hdat2.com/
MHDD: http://hddguru.com/download/software/mhdd/mhdd32ver4.6iso.zip
How to burn HDAT2 software to a CD, to check for bad sectors?
When you download HDAT2, choose Desktop as a download location, and double click on file hdat2iso_50.exe after you download it. WinRAR self-extracting archive will appear, where you need to click on Install; an ISO image (hdat2_v50.iso) will show up on the Desktop afterwards.
I use free software CDBurnerXP to burn my ISO images to a CD/DVD, and don’t e fooled by its name – besides Windows XP, it works perfectly on Windows 8.1. Download this software from the official download page: https://cdburnerxp.se/en/download
Install this program and run it; in the next windows select Burn ISO image:
Click on Browse… to choose the appropriate ISO image, burning speed (e.g., 16x), and your CD/DVD burner (Target device) and click on Burn disc (don’t forget to insert an empty CD in your optical drive):
Note: in the picture above I used ubcd ISO image, and following this procedure you can burn any ISO file such as hdat2 or mhdd and other. Wait for a while, and that’s it – you have bootable CD. Before we boot HDAT2 from a CD and start scanning bad sectors I’ll show you how to run HDAT2 from the bootable USB disk to have an alternative.
How to create HDAT2 bootable USB flash disk to check your hard disk for bad sectors
If you don’t want to buy empty CDs and waste them just for this tiny application, you can try USB booting. Follow this procedure that I used to create my HDAT2 bootable USB flash disk (I took screenshots with my smartphone’s camera in this test).
I want to make this a bit more complex: I want to use my card reader instead of my USB flash disk. That doesn’t make any change; the procedure is the same for both devices. I like to perform these experiments with my card reader because:
This Apacer card reader has already been going through a rough time with me, and this time I inserted a MicroSD card with 1 GB to use it as an alternative to USB flash disk:
In order to successfully write HDAT2 to your USB, you need to download IMG version of HDAT2 not ISO. So visit its homepage once again and look for a Boot Diskette IMG file and download this file:http://www.hdat2.com/files/hdat2img_50.exe
Double click on hdat2img_50.exe to run WinRAR self-extracting archive, and click on Install:
Because I wrote this article at various places, I downloaded and kept all my data on this MicroSD card, so I extracted this archive on E: which is assigned to my card reader. After that, I copied all contents of the card reader to my Desktop, which I advise you too, because the following procedure will format your USB flash disk. To write an IMG file to USB disk (or card reader) we need another tool – RMPrepUSB.
I downloaded a portable version of the app from here: http://www.rmprepusb.com/documents/release-2-0/RMPrepUSB_Portable_v2.1.727.zip?attredirects=0&d=1
For more info about portable apps, read our article regarding portable apps creation.
Run RMPrepUSB, by double-clicking on RMPREPUSB.exe; the app opens:
It’s important to select an appropriate USB device (you don’t want to format the wrong disk); in my case, assigned letter for my card reader is E and you can tell that by its capacity :). Click on File -> Drive and when this window opens:
… select this IMG file you previously extracted and click on Open. Follow this little wizard afterwards:
The default values (zeros) will be just fine to successfully create bootable USB disk, so click on OK on these dialogs.
Final overview before disk formatting:
If all went OK, you’ll see this window:
With this we’ve covered two ways to have your HDAT2 up and running (bootable CD and bootable USB disk). Now it’s time to boot up HDAT2 and perform a hard disk scan to see if there are any bad sectors.
How to use HDAT2 and perform a scan of your hard disk
If everything went OK, now you have bootable CD or bootable USB flash disk (or card reader), and it’s time to get rolling.
There is no universal way to enter the boot menu or BIOS settings to change the boot sequence. If you read my previous article regarding backup and restore via network , you saw that I had pressed F12 on my Fujitsu laptop to enter the Boot Menu. Although I tested everything on my laptop, I took these pics with my phone’s camera from two Desktop computers.
Although the picture quality isn’t perfect (sorry about that), you’ll figure out what to do. On this computer, you enter Startup Menu by pressing Esc (Escape) key; on the picture below you can see other keys you can use:
Select Boot menu; my boot menu is displayed below:
Our USB disk is created by using IMG file for floppy drives hence USB Floppy/CD name; select Generic Storage Device to boot it:
This is very interesting: I have Windows 8.1 installed with UEFI boot enabled, and this environment is based on legacy Windows 98 startup floppy disk! ? Gone are the times when I created startup floppy disks to perform administrative tasks. Let’s get back to reality: select the default option 1 – No Drivers. The next screen appears:
Type hdat2 command and confirm with Enter key:
Select your hard disk and press Enter:
Select Device tests menu, and Detect bad sectors menu afterwards:
Select Detect with READ:
The scan of bad sectors starts off:
Mhdd Not Detecting Drive Time
If the whole scanning bar is blue, that’s a good sign (note the legend: blue means O.K.). If you see red sectors with B inside them – that means it’s time to back up your hard drive because bad sectors had been found (I highlighted that part on the legend with red rectangle).
In the next section we’ll explain how to create a bootable USB disk that contains Ultimate Boot CD.
How to create bootable USB disk with Ultimate Boot CD ISO image
In this section we’ll go another step further – how about we create USB disk that contains bunch of useful software tools including HDAT2 and MHDD ?
This great collection of freeware tools is included in Ultimate Boot CD; if you need more info about list of applications included, check out here: https://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
Download ISO image: http://ftp.cc.uoc.gr/mirrors/linux/ubcd/ubcd533.iso
When you download ISO image, you can burn it with CDBurnerXP to a CD or write is to USB flash disk. I would always pick the bootable USB options, so I’ll discuss this and use Rufus to create bootable UBCD USB disk: https://rufus.akeo.ie/
Download portable version of Rufus and run it:
Set the parameters as on the picture above; double check if you selected the appropriate USB device, because you don’t want to format wrong USB device. Again and again, my card reader is put on heavy duty; an E: letter is assigned to it, and FAT32 file system. Select ISO Image in the combo box, the click on optical drive icon and select UBCD ISO image you previously downloaded. Click on Start to create bootable USB disk.
When the process is finished, don’t remove USB disk (or Card Reader) from your computer; restart your computer and select boot menu by pressing one of the function keys; I pressed F9 key:
Mhdd Not Detecting Drive Windows 7
Select USB Device (or similar option, depending on your computer):
OK, that’s it – Ultimate Boot CD is up and running:
Check out the various categories of UBCD (you can test your CPU or RAM, partition hard drive and other). Select HDD category and then Diagnosis:
UBCD provides a bunch of hard disk testing tools, including HDAT2, and two editions of MHDD32 software.
From this point, HDAT2 is used in an ordinary way described in this article. Try other software in this category, and other categories on UBCD. In the next section (BONUS section) we’ll mention MHDD, because it’s really reliable tool for detection of bad sectors – if it detects your hard drive (it hasn’t been updated for a long time).
BONUS: How to run MHDD software from USB flash disk to perform bad sector analysis
The current situation is as follows: MicroSD card is inserted in the card reader, and that USB monster is bootable and has Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) ISO image written to it. If I were you, I would experiment even more – how about we boot UBCD and run MHDD just by using MicroSD card (or any other)? That’s also possible if the computer is equipped with internal card reader. Many laptops have card reader already integrated, and this Desktop computer also has an integrated card reader. You can see this in the pictures below:
… how BIOS detected my MicroSD card:
I restarted this computer and UBCD started from MicroSD card. Navigate through the menus, as already showed in camera shots and select MHDD32 v4.6 .
If MHDD detects your hard disk, select it by pressing a key that corresponds to one of the assigned numbers and press Enter.
My hard disk is ST3500418AS, with the capacity of 500 GB:
Type the scan command to start the scanning process:
The scan is running:
The scan is finished:
Look at these great results: 3 sectors are read in 150-500 ms and above 500 ms there are no sectors. There are no bad sectors as well (marked with UNC and X letter).
If you find bad sectors on your hard disk, think about buying a new hard disk because bad sectors have tendency to expand themselves.
Happy experimenting,
Fil
How to check your hard disk for bad sectors
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In this article we'll discuss how to check your hard disk for bad sectors with HDAT2 and MHDD applications
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