Can anyone recommend a good free HDD diagnostic tool? I have an Hitachi notebook hard drive that may be bad and I would like to test it. I tried Hitachi's diagnostic software and it keeps getting stuck. First it got stuck at "loading DFT (Drive Fitness Test)...." I then disabled Legacy USB Support in the BIOS and for some reason it got past the loading part and past the license agreement, and now it gets stuck at "Detecting IDE Primary Master". I'm not sure what USB support has to do with anything, I used DFT from a CD.

Hard Drive Health: http://www.panterasoft.com/

The manufacturer of the the drive would have the best tools to check it. How are you running the Hitachi test? If there is a utility that runs from a boot CD I suggest you use that rather than a Windows based one.

Thanks for the replies. Hard Drive Health seems to be for using in Windows. The notebook I have won't load Windows anymore so I wanted to test the hard drive. I can't ask the person now, but I believe she said she was burning music to a cd and a window, or windows, popped up that mentioned deleting files or deleting something. I was running the Hitachi test from a boot CD. It still puzzles me how disabling USB legacy support has anything to do with this. The software still freezes, but it goes further after disabling.

maxtor hitachi and seagate offer tools. As above the OEM usually has best tools. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

Testdisk WinXp Amd 64 3000 Msi Neo2 Platinuim 1 gig ddr 400. When we cast a pebble into a pond we should look past the first ripple.