Hard drive treatment program Victoria. How to use the Victoria program

Bad sectors on the hard drive

What are bad sectors on a disk? First, let's briefly look at the organization of information storage on a hard drive.

A hard drive actually usually consists of several magnetic disks. Magnetic reading heads move above the rotating disks. When recording, the heads magnetize certain areas of the disk, thereby recording zeros and ones - that is, information. Information is not written anywhere, but in strictly defined areas of the disk. The disk is divided into tracks, and they, in turn, into sectors. Information is recorded in these sectors.

In some cases, information from a sector on a disk cannot be read. This sector is called broken. The reason for the formation of bad sectors may be sudden shutdown power supply during hard disk recording operation, shock during operation, overheating or physical wear and tear. Most often, bad sectors on a hard drive are formed as a result of the first two reasons.

Program for checking disk and recovering bad sectors Victoria

Victoria is a free recovery program by Belarusian programmer Sergei Kazansky bad sectors and checking the hard drive. This program also has a Windows version. But I strongly recommend using the DOS version for more reliable operation of the hard drive. Below you will find instructions for working with the DOS version of Victoria.

The Victoria program allows you to view the SMART table of your hard drive, scan the disk surface for bad and hard-to-read sectors, restore bad sectors, and perform all sectors on the hard drive (low-level formatting). So, let's get down to business!

Checking the disk for bad sectors

Before you start checking and repairing bad sectors of your hard drive, you need to make preparations. It is necessary to properly configure the hard drive controller in the BIOS so that the program can work correctly with hard drive.

It is necessary to set the SATA controller mode in the BIOS to IDE. IN AHCI mode Victoria will not be able to recognize the hard drive and will not be able to work with it.

Now you can boot into DOS using a bootable USB flash drive and launch Victoria.

First of all, you need to select the IDE channel with which we will work, that is, to which the person being tested is connected hard drive.

To do this, press the "P" (Latin) key. In the menu that appears, select a channel and press Enter. If your drive is connected to a SATA port, then most likely you need to select Ext. PCI ATA/SATA. If your drive has an IDE connector, then select the port to which it is connected.

If there is a SATA controller correctly configured in the BIOS on the motherboard (in IDE mode), the program will display a list of channels. It is necessary to enter from the keyboard the number of the channel to which the drive being tested is connected. In our case it is "3".

Enter the number "3" and press Enter. After the channel has been selected, you need to initialize the hard drive in the program. To do this, press the key F2. Service information of the hard drive (its model, capacity and other information) will appear on the screen. If this happens, then you did everything correctly and the program was able to connect to the disk.

Now the first thing you should do is look at the SMART table of the hard drive. In many cases, the information from it can clarify the situation even without scanning the surface. To view a SMART disk in Victoria 3.52 you need to press the key F9 .

In the table, we are primarily interested in two points: Reallocated sector count And Current pending sectors . The first parameter shows the number of sectors transferred to the reserve zone (restored or remap), the second parameter shows the number of suspicious sectors, that is, which the hard drive could not read for one reason or another.

As you can see in the figure above, the number of recovered sectors on this disk is very large (767). This indicates that the disk most likely has some problems with the surface of the disk. In addition, SMART also shows the presence of suspicious sectors, which confirms the version of damage to the disk surface. Such a disk may be able to be recovered, but it should not be used in the future. Such a large number of bad sectors indicates that the disk is no longer reliable. It is better to replace such a disk with a new one and clone information from the defective disk to it. But first, in any case, you need to try to restore damaged sectors on your hard drive.

To return from SMART, press any key.

Recovering bad sectors of a hard drive

Now let's look at the question of how to recover bad sectors on a disk. Fixing bad sectors is actually not that difficult. To begin with, you can simply scan the disk for bad sectors, but we will immediately enable the recovery function.

Now we should say a little about the mechanism for restoring bad sectors or bad blocks. There are two types of unreadable sectors.

In the first case, the sector cannot be read due to a mismatch between the information written in it and the checksum at the end of the sector. This problem can happen if the power is suddenly turned off during the recording process. That is, when the information in the sector has managed to be recorded, but the checksum remains old. Such bad sectors are not inherently defective. They just contain conflicting information that the hard drive cannot recognize. Such bad sectors are treated by erasing the information in them and writing new correct checksums. After this, the sector becomes readable and writable.

In the second case, there is physical damage to the sector (demagnetization, scratch, etc.). Such a defect may occur, for example, due to a shock or overheating of the hard drive during operation. In this case, the process of fixing bad sectors is more complicated. Each disk has a spare unused area. That is, any disk actually has a slightly larger capacity than is actually used. This area is used to redirect unreadable sectors to it. A new physical address in the spare area for the defective sector is entered into the disk table. The logical address remains the same. That is, the sector seems to remain the same, but in reality it is located in a different place (remap). This approach, of course, reduces the read and write speed in the area of ​​the disk with the transferred sector, since the magnetic heads have to move to the end of the disk (to the spare area) when accessing the redirected sector. But this approach is justified when the number of forwarded sectors is small and the data processing speed is reduced slightly.

Restoring bad sectors using the Victoria 3.52 program

Now let's put the theory into practice. To open the disk check menu, press the key F4. In the dialog box that appears, move the cursor to the item for selecting actions with unreadable sectors and with the cursor on the keyboard, scrolling to the right or left, select the item BB: Erase 256 sect as shown in the picture. Now press Enter and the process of scanning the disk surface for bad blocks will start. The process is quite long. If you want to interrupt the scanning process, press Esc on your keyboard.

If a bad sector is detected, the program will try to erase it. If the sector is physically healthy, then this attempt will be successful. There will be no information left in the sector, but it will be possible to use it in the future. Don't worry too much about the information. If the sector is unreadable, then it is practically impossible to extract it from there, so by erasing the sector, no additional information is lost. If the sector is unreadable due to a physical defect in the disk, then an attempt to erase the unreadable sector will fail and an error will be reported, as in the figure below.

Even if the process of erasing sectors ends with an error, I recommend not stopping the scan, since the disk may have bad sectors of both the first and second options. And if a bad sector can be restored by erasing, then it is better to do so than to transfer it to the reserve area (which is quite limited).

If it was not possible to restore bad sectors by erasing, then you should try transferring unreadable sectors to the reserve area (remapping). Press the key F4. This time use the arrows to select BB: Classic REMAP as shown in the picture. After that press Enter. The scanning process will begin again. But this time, when a bad sector is detected, the Victoria program will try to perform redirection and move the bad block to the backup area. On some drives, the spare area is very small, so if it runs out of space, the attempt will fail. In our case, everything went well (picture below).

Bad sectors on the hard drive have been successfully restored. Now you need to check the file system for errors (for example, through the ERD Commander utility chkdsk or booting into Windows, if possible) or format the disk. After this, you can continue to use your hard drive without any problems.

The Victoria program is designed for testing various drives: HDD, flash, RAID arrays, also allows you to hide HDD surface defects, if such a possibility is present. The author of the program is Sergey Kazansky, it is distributed free of charge, you can download it http://hdd-911.com/

Brief description of the program

On Vista and older systems, the program must be run as Administrator, even if your account has administrator rights.

The program window is divided into several tabs: Standard, SMART, Test, Advanced and Setup. The API and PIO switches change the mode of operation of the program with the disk under test. PIO mode requires support from the motherboard chipset. Modern systems younger than approximately 2011 do not support this mode of program operation, so we will not describe it. Let's bring brief description control elements in tabs.

Standard. The window on the right shows a list of drives installed in the system. These are not only hard drives, but also USB flash drives, SD, CF and other memory card readers. They can also be tested. Selecting a device for testing is done by clicking on the desired item. Immediately to the left in the Drive ATA passport window, information about the selected device is displayed. Seek, Acoustic management & BAD"er runs the seek test, allows you to control AAM (if supported by the disk) and simulate on disk.

S.M.A.R.T. When you press the Get SMART button, the SMART is read. USB drives are not supported. The remaining buttons SMART ON, SMART OFF, Auto save attributes ON/OFF allow you to enable/disable SMART monitoring and save the read attributes.

Test. The main tab that we will work with in the future. The Start LBA/End LBA windows specify the beginning and end of the tested area. By default, the entire disk is tested. Pause – pauses the test, the value changes to Continue. Start – starts the selected test, changes the value to Stop – stops the test. Diamond with green arrows - moving forward or backward along the surface of the disk. Block size – the size of the block of sectors read at a time; you can leave it alone. Timeout – time after which, if there is no response from the drive, the program will move to the next sector. End of test – what to do at the end of the test: stop the disk, start the test over again, turn off the disk or turn off the computer. The color scale shows the number of blocks with the specified reading time. Switches Verify, Read, Write – test selection. Verify - check: the disk reads the sector, but does not transfer its contents to the computer. Read – reads a sector into the computer. Write – erases a sector - this test destroys user data. Switches Ignor, Remap, Restore, Erase – mode of working with bad blocks. Ignore - skip. Remap – attempt to perform the procedure of reassigning a sector from the reserve. Restore – attempts to read data and write it back (does not work on modern disks >80GB). Erase – an attempt to write to a damaged sector. It can correct it if an incorrect check sum (CRC) is written to the sector. > - test execution forward. ?|

Advanced. The main window shows the contents of the sector specified in the Sec field. The window below shows the contents of the partition table using the View part data button. The MBR ON/OFF buttons enable/disable the ability to recognize partitions in the operating system.

Example of working with the Victoria program For an example of testing a disk, let's take a faulty HDD WD2600BEVT, which has surface damage and bad attributes in SMART. We launch the program, select our disk and see the following: on the left we see the parameters of the selected disk.
Next, on the SMART tab, you can see the SMART of our disk. Here he is.

Attribute 5 Reallocated sector count – number of reassigned sectors 1287 - the disk “crumbles”.

Attribute 197 Current pending sectors – the number of candidate sectors for reassignment; if the 5th attribute is full, it indicates that the disk is “crumbling”, the surface is quickly degrading.

This means that if you need data from a disk, you need to copy it immediately, and not try to repair such a disk. The actions that we will consider next can lead to the loss of information.

You can uncheck the Grid checkbox, then a disk reading graph will be displayed. In places where there are bad spots, speed dips are visible, marked in red.

Victoria program(Victoria) is designed to check the computer’s hard drive for any problems using a large list of parameters. It includes functionality that provides the ability to search for various errors and contains software to check the performance of your hard drive.

This test is not informative; for a more detailed analysis, you need to run a detection and recovery test bad sectors. Go to the “Test” item and click the “Start” button.

Performs hard drive testing. Upon completion of work, displays a detailed report.

Sector status information

If errors were found, highlight them on the grid and click “Restore”. If restoration does not help, then click on the “Clear” button.

Victoria HDD will detect all malfunctions in hard drives and, by eliminating them, will increase the performance of your PC.

The Victoria hdd utility was created to solve problems and check various types of hard drives with the ability to use different parameters. The software has advanced functionality that allows you to solve various hard drive problems that arise under current circumstances.

Utility features

This utility can be downloaded from

Download the archive, unpack it and run the executive file vcr446f.exe

The utility interface opens.

This free software has a logical and simple interface with various additional software modules for examining hard drives. Even the average person can understand the program. inexperienced user, because all the points are written in clear language, and you can even understand the basic and most important functions even at the first launch.
The Victoria hdd utility will help the user perform a thorough check of the hard drive; as a result, information about the status of the hard drive will be provided. In addition, you can perform self-diagnosis in the “S.M.A.R.T.” mode. which allows you to determine the service life of the disk.

Victoria hdd software has a function to check the surface of the hdd disk for possible damage and other problems. The utility can perform full check hard drive for defective sectors, after analysis, information about the state of the media as a whole is provided. If Victoria hdd finds bad sectors, they will be reassigned so that you can use the drive in the future without losing data.
The Victoria disk utility can be used by both professional repairmen and ordinary users. Depending on dexterity and skills, the user can configure the Victoria hdd software to suit his needs, which will change the hard drive analysis algorithm.

What is included in the functionality of the Victoria utility:
The utility is able to give a detailed report on the operation of the hard drive and its technical characteristics;
Allows you to identify connected media via a sata/ide channel;
Has the ability to detect flaws on the surface of the hard drive;
Capable of eliminating hard drive shortcomings caused during operation, such as encryption of a bad sector and others;
Equipped with a practical and comfortable smart monitor that clearly displays important vital signs of the disk;
Has an integrated explorer for working with the file system;
Detailed help system on using and setting up the Victoria hdd utility;
The Victoria utility is absolutely free;

The Victoria hdd utility was created to conduct various tests of hard drives; it is more suitable for people with an above-average level of computer use. If you are running the Victoria hdd utility for the first time, it is better not to change the preset settings if you have no idea about their purpose.
In general, the Victoria utility is very useful and relevant for tracking hard drive problems and successfully eliminating most failures. This software has already been able to restore more than one practically “dead” hard drive, and if you are faced with a problem related to a hard drive, the Victoria hdd utility will be very useful.

Checking the hard drive

We open the program, and on the “Standard” tab we see the disk passport, which is listed on the right.

Go to the “Tests” tab. Select the “Ignore” check mode. In this mode, the program will make requests to sectors of the hard drive and if they are faulty or faulty, it will skip them.

Click the “Start” button. Scanning has started.

I stopped the utility (it takes a long time to check), but the results (not the entire disk) can already be assessed.

Explanation:

We put the utility into recovery mode and click “Start”

Victoria hdd video:

Bad sectors on a hard drive What are bad sectors on a disk? First, let's briefly look at the organization of information storage on a hard drive. A hard drive actually consists of...

Bad sectors on a hard drive What are bad sectors on a disk? First, let's briefly look at the organization of information storage on a hard drive. A hard drive actually consists of...

Winchesters, like any other computer components, may break, malfunction or be damaged. In such cases, whenever possible, it is required hard restoration disk using a special software. Thanks to their use, you can thoroughly check the disk and fix minor malfunctions.

Considering that most users use computers and laptops for simple everyday use, practice shows that this is enough for efficient work for a long time yet.

In this article we will talk about one of these programs, Victoria HDD, designed to check your hard drive. Let's figure out what this utility is, how to use it, and what you can achieve with it.

First of all, we can say that the Victoria program was created by a leading specialist from Belarus. It is absolutely free and is freely available on the Internet. Thanks to its wide functionality and simple design, Victoria is suitable for both novice users and professionals.

Victoria is suitable for everyone Windows versions, including Windows XP/7/8/10 and supports x32 and x64 bit platforms.

Functional modes

This program has several operating modes:

1. API (using Windows OS tools).
2. Offline mode via ports.

As for the first, it is the main one and has a number of possibilities. Its main advantage is its simplicity and convenience, which makes it accessible even to inexperienced users.

If we talk about offline mode, then he's in to a greater extent intended for work by a specialist. With its help, you can get the most accurate readings and conduct a thorough diagnosis of both external and internal hard drives. In addition, it has a more extensive set of recovery tools.

Program functionality

According to the information provided by the official website, this hard drive testing program is capable of:

• Speed ​​up your PC.
• Restore stable work operating system and individual programs.

To achieve such significant results, the utility has a positive effect on the HDD and provides:

• Replacement of defective sectors of the hard drive with spare ones.
• Elimination of bad sectors.
• Repair of damaged areas.

Thus, using this software, you can restore the performance of the drive and extend its service life.

System recovery tools

Of course, you can use conventional recovery tools, and then the operating system itself will replace the damaged sectors with backup ones.

This is done by running a drive volume check, however, this type of replacement has its drawbacks:

1. Works with the active volume exclusively in DOS mode.
2. Does not provide the user with detailed information.
3. Does not allow you to choose how to solve the problem yourself.

That is, standard tools do not have such wide functionality as third-party programs.

Without a doubt, Bill Gates created an excellent operating system. But think about how much standard programs you replaced. For example, browser Internet Explorer, notepad or explorer. That is why checking and restoring the hard drive should be done using the Victoria program, and not built-in tools.

Working with the utility

Before starting to work with the Victoria program and presenting a guide on its use, I would like to clarify that the main language of the utility is English. However, on the Internet it can be found entirely in Russian; to do this, enter the corresponding phrase into the search.

Thanks to the support of the Russian language, it is incredibly convenient to use, which cannot be said about other similar utilities. Download only the newest version, since it is the one that has all the tools necessary for work and contains a minimum of errors, if any, of course.

Download and launch

It’s incredibly easy to find a program on the Internet by entering the phrase “Download Victoria” in a search engine. You can also read its detailed description there. Next, select a reliable site, preferably one that has been previously verified, and download the utility from it to your PC.

The Victoria program does not require installation, since it will be in the form of an archive. Unzip it, go inside and you will see a single file “vcr447.exe”.

For your convenience, you can create a shortcut on your desktop.

Running on a computer with an operating system installed Windows system 7, 8 and above, is carried out exclusively on behalf of the administrator. To do this, right-click on the icon and select “Run as administrator.”

Before the program opens, several windows will appear on the screen:

Don't worry, it's a simple call to PC repair experts. This is a warning that there is no driver to work with the ports. Just click “OK” everywhere, and Victoria will launch.

Getting started

To open the graphical shell of the utility, you need to go to the “Standard” tab. All connected hard drives will be displayed on the right, select the one you want to check. Even if there is only one, click on it and all the data relating to it will be displayed on the left.

Next, go to “Smart” and click the “Get Smart” button. The table will display 242 parameters of your device. They are recorded from the first day of use of the drive, and the program reads them from the system.

The fifth point in the “Health” column deserves special attention:

• Green circles indicate disk sectors in excellent condition.
• Yellow color – indicators are not normal.
• Red circles indicate that the parameters are unacceptable.

We also need to say about the “Raw” column, where you can see the number of bad sectors of the hard drive.

Test tab

Now you should go to the “Test” tab. The principle by which the HDD test is carried out is to measure the duration of time from a request to receiving a response from sectors individually.

During the process of scanning the hard drive, the program evaluates the scanned sectors and graphically shows problem areas, indicating them with multi-colored rectangles.

Clusters are designated a certain color, which depends on its state:

• Gray ones are perfectly readable sectors.
• Green ones take longer to respond, but are in good condition.
• Orange ones take a long time to read. It is these sectors that slow down the disk. They are working, but very soon they will become unusable. Their number should not exceed 50 pieces.
• Red – damaged sectors “bad blocks” that cannot be considered and cannot be restored. If you have such sectors, you should think about changing the hard drive.
• Blue with a cross – reading sectors causes a failure. The information contained on them cannot be . Such sectors need to be re-partitioned so that the HDD does not use them during operation. This is done by using the remap function, which we will talk about later.

Actions according to the modes will be applied to those sectors in front of which you check the boxes.

Operating modes

We can talk about four modes of operation that the Victoria program has:

• Ignore – normal hard drive diagnostics without affecting bad sectors.
• Remap – replacing bad sectors with backup ones.
• Restore – programmatic restoration of damaged sectors “bad blocks”.
• Erase – overwriting bad sectors. The function is most effective when there are software bad blocks on the hard drive, especially when there are a lot of them and it is required maximum speed recovery. When using this function, all information is erased.

The last point deserves special attention - Erase. It should be tested only when the “Remap” and “Restore” modes do not bring results, but before that it is advisable to save all the information on the drive.

Reserve sectors

The operating system allocates reserve place on every hard drive. Often this is the slowest section of about 8% at the center of the hard drive.

If bad sectors appear, the system transfers the information available on them to the reserve area. This happens when the HDD is scanned for errors using standard using Windows or through the use of third party software.

Diagnostics

After you select a mode and check the boxes next to the rectangles, you can click “Start”. When using for the first time, it is not recommended to change the default settings. In this case, the usual operation will be carried out, without applying any actions to the damaged sectors.

If you follow the points in our step by step instructions, but after starting the scan nothing happens, this may be due to the fact that you did not select the hard drive in the “Standard” tab. In this case, you need to go back and do this.

The diagnostic process can be observed visually. IN earlier versions Victoria programs displayed the sectors being checked in the form of a grid.

However, this overloaded the processor when there was a large hard drive. That is why, already starting from version 4.47, it was decided to switch to visualization using a graph. It can be seen just a few minutes after the start of the diagnosis.

In both versions it can be disabled by unchecking the “Grid” checkbox.

The HDD testing process can take quite a long time, it all depends on the capacity of your drive. It is also not recommended to use a computer during the test, otherwise the results may not be accurate.

Buttons

After scanning starts, the “Start” button disappears, and “Stop” appears instead, by clicking on which you can stop the scan.

Also, for the convenience of users, there is a Pause button, with which you can pause the scanning process, and a “Continue” button to continue it from the same place where it was stopped.

Before checking your hard drive, be sure to disable all programs. If this is not done, then the indicators may be inaccurate, and the number of sectors orange color will increase significantly, since some of them will be used by running utilities.

Is it possible to save the drive with Victoria?

Using Victoria program you can replace about 8% of bad sectors, correct errors and unsatisfactory performance of sectors in a volume if this happened due to system failures. Of course, Victoria is unable to fix physical damage to the hard drive.

If you cure sectors that can be corrected and rewrite the remaining ones to reserve, then such treatment of the hard drive will significantly increase the duration of its operation. In this case, it should appear in the form additional device, while the Windows operating system needs to be placed on a good drive.

As for analogues, it has them, for example the same HDD Regerenator, MHDD. The functionality of the first is quite limited, while the second program practically duplicates Victoria and works only under MS-DOS.

Update: Since Victoria runs under Windows, it may produce false results. To prevent this from happening, you must close all open applications and pause your work on your PC. To get a more accurate result, you can use its analogue -.

Detailed video lesson

Professional help

If you are unable to resolve the problems yourself,
then most likely the problem lies more technical level.
It could be: breakdown motherboard, power supply,
hard drive, video card, RAM etc.

It is important to diagnose and repair the breakdown in time,
to prevent failure of other components.

Our specialist will help you with this.

Leave a request and receive
Free consultation and diagnostics from a specialist!

Hard drive - complex physical device, designed for recording and storing information. The surface of the disk is divided into tracks. The vertical stack of these tracks forms a cylinder. The track is divided into smaller sections called sectors. Each sector is marked. Their number depends on the interface that is used to communicate with the disk.

The hard drive is vulnerable. The reasons for failure may be a malfunction in the operation of the device software, failure of the controller, power failures, disruption of physical contact with the interface, sticking of the magnetic head, etc. The main defects of disks are sectors with damaged magnetic coating. Information cannot be stored in these areas.

Defective sectors are called bad sectors. Bad sectors located on the zero track are especially dangerous, because this is the boot area.

To determine the presence of bad sectors and the possibility of restoring them, Belarusian programmer Sergei Kazansky developed the Victoria utility. The latest release of the program was June 26, 2013. License type is Freeware, which makes it especially popular.

Purpose

The Victoria program allows you to perform low-level testing of a hard drive with parallel interface connections - IDE (ATA - Advanced Technology Attachment) and SATA interfaces - serial interface connections. Output detailed information about the physical condition of the drive, its performance, errors.

The Victoria program performs an in-depth analysis of the HDD state with the ability to restore bad sectors. This tool can be used by both service center professionals and ordinary users to evaluate the performance of the drive, the ability to correct errors, and analyze all the physical characteristics of the hard drive.

Video: Victoria HDD scan

Key Features

1. comprehensive information about the technical characteristics of hard media;
2. analytics of HDD self-monitoring parameters;
3. testing of many technical parameters;
4. the ability to change disk space due to bad clusters;
5. constructing surface graphs;
6. eliminating bad clusters from used ones - replacing them with backup ones;
7. HDD performance analysis;
8. determining the speed of access to clusters;
9. clearing the disk of information without the possibility of recovery;
10. protecting the device by setting a password;
11. the ability to copy any sectors to a file;
12. context help system;
13. other useful features.

Installation and launch

There are:

• boot versions of the program. In this case, you need to create either a boot floppy disk or a boot disk. The tool for creating a floppy disk is the makedisk.bat file. To create a bootable CD, you need to unzip the program file and burn it ISO image to disk;
• Not boot version. The program is unpacked directly onto your hard drive.

In the first case, after downloading from the devices, you can start working with the program.

In the second, to obtain a complete picture of the state of the hard drive, a number of conditions must be met:

• disable the controller channel of the disk being checked;
• shut down all running programs;
• run Victoriyu only on a warm disk.

Launch from the operating system is carried out by the application vcr446f.exe.

After launch, the user is presented with a window with a clear English-language interface.

HDD recovery using Victoria

The first tab is Standard, which provides information about the passport of the hard drive or drive that we want to test. (Selection is made in the upper right window of the section).

Photo: information about the hard drive passport

The second tab is Smart.

Photo: tab for checking disk self-test parameters

Here you can check such parameters of the HDD self-testing system as:

On the right side of the window, click the GetSMART button and get an assessment of the health of the hard drive as a whole (next to the GetSMART button) and by parameters.

The third tab is Tests. The main partition, which allows you to quickly detect and cure disk sectors.

The hard drive is divided into many clusters of the same size. The Victoria program, while running, accesses each cluster during testing. The duration of the call is analyzed. How more time expectations, the more likely a physical defect in this area is.

There are many reasons for defects:

In this section, testing launch modes are important, which can be selected in the lower right window. These are the modes:

• Ignore - allows you to run the test in information mode, without making adjustments;
• Erase - mode for cleaning the hard drive (used carefully and rarely);
• Remap - check with simultaneous replacement of damaged sectors with working ones. Can be used after checking in ignore mode if damaged clusters are found;
• Restore - restoration. Used in the case when the remaining sectors are not reassigned after checking in remap mode.

To start the test, press the “START” button. The sectors being checked are graphically displayed in the left window and are indicated by color. In the windows on the right you can see the percentage of the tested device volume and the number of tested clusters.

Bad sectors on the HDD are hidden by replacing them from the reserve area of ​​the hard drive. Reassigned so that they are no longer read. The utility allows you to restore only a hard drive that does not have any physical damage in its parts. If there is wear or an obvious breakdown, then software, of course, cannot be corrected.

Testing with the utility is considered low-level, but has high performance. So testing a 232 GB device takes about 60 minutes.

After the testing, error correction or recovery procedure, you need to restart the computer and recheck. The result should improve.

If, as a result of testing, there are too many bad clusters and they are located at the beginning of the hard drive, then such a disk is not recommended. Viktoria contains useful in this case a function that allows you to halve the size of your hard drive due to bad sectors. After this procedure, the HDD can be used as a second disk, or external storage. It is not suitable for installing an operating system.

Video: HDD diagnostics and repair

Legend

During testing, you can see rectangles of different colors in the window.

They clearly display a picture of the disk status:

• The sector marked in white is considered normal. The response from him comes within 5 ms;
• light grey. Response within 20 ms;
• grey. The response arrives within 50 ms;
• green. Response within 200 ms;
• orange. Response within 600 ms;
• red. Sectors that will no longer work;
• blue. "Deadly" sectors. Cannot be restored.

All these designations are in the test section, in the middle lower window. Next to them are numbers indicating the response time from the cluster to the program. The gray and white sectors are not damaged. Green is also a worker, but already strives for bad things.
Orange is a bad sector that can be restored either low level formatting, or the utility of S. Kazansky.

In order to be able to use the functions of restoring these sectors, you need to check the boxes opposite the designations in the check boxes.

For full-fledged work It is recommended to periodically test the components of your computer. The main device is the hard drive. Typically it houses the operating system. The user's comfort at the computer depends on the performance of the disk and its performance. Perform production tasks.

A high-quality, fast HDD testing program is necessary for a specialist involved in technical support, and for the average user. The functions of full-fledged and, importantly, fast low-level testing are performed by Sergei Kazansky’s Victoria program.

Majority modern computers run under the Windows operating system, so it is recommended to use version 4.46. It can be found on the manufacturer's website. The latest release of the program was June 2013. It is compatible with Windows 7, does not load the registry, and can be launched from any media. Easy to use.

Victoria serves as an assistant in various situations. For example, when buying a used drive to assess its technical condition, when the operating system slows down, to restore important information. In other matters, and to delete irrevocably classified information.

The program is a complete solution that combines the capabilities of several diagnostic utilities for the hard drive and useful functions. It is one of the most widely used programs for recovering bad HDD sectors.

Good afternoon Continuing the series of articles about the tools needed as to a simple user for those who want to figure it out themselves and maybe fix something, and for the person for whom this is work. Today we’ll look at the simplest option primary, inspection of your HDD hard drive. .

If you have a sneaking suspicion that your computer has started to slow down, or there are errors when recording, the OS often crashes, or something else gives you the idea to check your friend HDD, you should pay attention to the Victoria program.

There are two types of this program and they differ noticeably for the user. There is an option to use Victoria from under DOS and an option running under Windows. In the first case, there are many nuances of how to launch with bootable media like working with the program itself, it will be difficult for an untrained user to perceive all this. Therefore, today let's look at the operation of the second option, namely Victoria 4.47, which is designed to run from under the OS.

I’ll try to explain right away that working with a hard drive requires caution, especially if the data on it is important to you. Using automatic scanning and repair of HDD sectors in Victoria may lead to the loss of some information. Be extremely careful, and it is better if you identify problems with the help of Victoria, contact specialists. Self-medication with this type of technique ends badly.

In this case, the article is of a recommendatory nature, as check hard drive and spend primary diagnostics, or make sure everything is in order. In a system with one physical disk, scanning and correcting sectors of the same disk from which you loaded the OS is generally something extremely unprofessional. Therefore, we will only learn two things now: launching Victoria in order to obtain SMART information, as well as launching surface scanning.

Checking the hard drive with Victoria. S.M.A.R.T.

First, download the program below from the attachment version 4.47 with support for win7/8/10 x64. Or from the official development site. But the version there is 4.46b and it does not work well with 64-bit systems. After downloading the archive, unpack it to any convenient place. And run the file vcr447.exe. The program interface is, of course, overloaded with information, but don’t be alarmed, in fact, almost all of this is actually used and recorded during operation. Now, through some manipulations, we will receive information about the state of the selected HDD, otherwise called SMART.

S.M.A.R.T. monitors the main characteristics of the drive, each of which receives an assessment. Characteristics can be divided into two groups:

1. parameters reflecting the natural aging process of a hard drive (spindle speed, number of head movements, number of on-off cycles);
2. current drive parameters (height of heads above the disk surface, number of remapped sectors, track search time and number of search errors).

To do this, in the upper right part of the program we look in the list for the hard drive that we want to check. Well, or if there is only one, then select it there and press the Passport button to read the disk data.

Reallocated Sectors Count:

Number of sector remap operations. When the drive detects a read/write error, it marks the sector as "remapped" and transfers the data to a specially designated reserve region. That's why on modern hard drives you cannot see bad blocks - they are all hidden in reassigned sectors. This process is called remapping, and the remapped sector is called remap. The higher the value, the worse the condition of the disk surface. The raw value field contains the total number of sectors remapped.
An increase in the value of this attribute may indicate a deterioration in the condition of the disk plate surface.

In fact, these same bad blocks exist, only they are hidden in reassigned sectors. Accordingly, if the value is different from zero, it is already worth thinking about the safety of your data and stability in operation. If there is no important data on such a medium, operation can be continued, but here everything depends on the number of sectors, the dynamics of their formation, and the greed of the user :). The second parameter that is worth paying special attention to is:

Current Pending SectorCount:

Number of sectors that are candidates for replacement. They have not yet been defined as bad, but reading from them differs from reading a stable sector; these are the so-called suspicious or unstable sectors. If the subsequent reading of the sector is successful, it is excluded from the list of candidates. In case of repeated erroneous reads, the drive tries to recover it and performs a remapping operation.
An increase in the value of this attribute may indicate physical degradation of the hard drive.

Friends like these don’t mean that everything is bad, you can still try to get them back into action. This is why there is surface scanning with correction of damaged sectors. They appear very often when the power from the HDD is unexpectedly turned off (the light blinks), when the power supply is faulty, or when the OS is shut down incorrectly, again, accompanied by an unexpected power outage. With a successful remap or erase of sectors hanging in uncertainty, we will see a decrease in their number in the SMART table. Another parameter that you should pay attention to is:

UltraDMA CRC Error Count:

The number of errors that occur when transmitting data over the external interface in UltraDMA mode (packet integrity violations, etc.). An increase in this attribute indicates a bad (crumpled, twisted) cable and poor contacts. Also, similar errors appear during overclocking. PCI buses, power failures, strong electromagnetic interference, and sometimes due to the fault of the driver.
Perhaps the reason is a poor-quality cable. To fix this, try using a SATA cable without latches that has a tight connection to the drive contacts.

If there are errors in the current attribute, it is worth replacing the data loop. You can do this yourself.

Checking the hard drive with Victoria. CHECKING THE DISC SURFACE.

Going to the third Test tab, I will draw your attention to only the Start button, after clicking which you will begin scanning the physical surface of the HDD, recording each sector in a category separated by color gradation.

The bottom line is that, depending on the reading time, the sector falls into a certain category, and accordingly, the worse the sector, the more colorful the group. Particularly difficult ones fall into the red group, tolerable ones into the orange group, etc. When a sector is found with a response delay greater permissible norm we get the group sector error, perhaps this is our Current Pending Sector. But I don’t advise you to fix sectors yourself, and especially through the Window version of Victoria.

A lot of users came across the most obvious thing, when by installing remap they remapped the very first sector to the HDD in a second :) After which the partition table crashed and the user was left alone with the disk in RAW format without your data. Moreover, in such situations, when the user was left alone, I would bet on the victory of the tough one :)

Therefore, if you find obvious deviations from the norms in SMART, many hanging sectors during the check, I advise you to try to copy important information and contact the service center. There, based on conclusions based on secondary and more difficult to formulate parameters, they will draw a conclusion whether to repair it or replace it. Good luck, and don’t lose your data!)

In this material I will talk about the program - Victoria, explain how to use Victoria HDD and describe its general functionality. Hard drive is one of the most important components computer system. A lot really depends on the reliability and efficiency of its operation, and if the hard drive breaks or begins to “crumble,” then the computer simply stops functioning normally. At the same time, there are software tools that allow you to effectively identify and eliminate hardware failures in the operation of a hard drive - this is the Victoria HDD program.

The Victoria program has a history of more than fifteen years, but the last update of this product dates back to 2008. The creator of the program, Belarusian programmer Sergei Kazansky, managed to create an application that works with hard drives at low level, directly through the I/O ports. The Victoria application is free, it is highly efficient, it supports work in command mode and other bonuses have made Wiki highly popular among both amateurs and specialized IT specialists, including service center professionals. Next, I will tell you how to use Victoria.

What the Victoria program can do

Among the advantages of the Victoria program, experts note the following:

• The program is simple and does not require special installation;
• The application is modest in size;
• This software can check the disk at a low level;
• Effectively finds and corrects bad sectors, blocks and other hardware dysfunctions of the hard drive;
• Can read S.M.A.R.T data;
• Using Victoria you can calculate the speed of writing and reading from a disk;
• Able to work with the noise coefficient of the hard drive;
• Supports various test variations;
• Supports AHCI interface;
• It is universal in nature and supports the vast majority of HDD drives.

How to use Victoria HDD

Before turning to the functionality of the program, I note that “Victoria” only works with the physical state of the disk, file system errors and software problems in most cases they go unnoticed (in the latter case, tools such as Scandisk, NDD and others will help you).

On at the moment There are two main versions of Victoria HDD:

• The first version allows you to work with the program directly under the Windows OS, but its functionality in some cases may work less reliably (fixing bad sectors is not always effective).
• The second version allows you to run the program from a boot disk (flash drive).

Since most users work with Victoria through Windows OS, I will consider this particular version of the program.

1. So, as already mentioned, to use the Victoria program, just download it to your computer and run executable file(the program does not require unpacking). The program itself can be downloaded from one of the popular software portals, since downloading proprietary programs on Sergei Kazansky’s official website often does not work.
2. After launching the Victoria program (be sure to run it as an administrator), you will see a window with five main tabs.
3. In the “Standard” tab on the right you will see all the hard drives detected on you; by clicking on each of them, you will receive their full passport data on the left (model, firmware, cache, etc.).
4. Click on the drive we need on the right, and go to another tab called “SMART”. Click on the “Get SMART” button and you will receive complete data on the status of your disk.

Pay special attention to the Reallocated Sector Count (number of reassigned sectors) and Reallocated event count (number of reassignment operations) parameters. The higher this indicator, the worse your hard drive is doing.

Pay attention to the attributes of the SMART option in Victoria:

The next (third) tab is called “Test”. Here we can directly test the surface of a hard drive with a remap (reassignment of a sector from the reserve).

1. To carry out the test, check the “Remap” box, check the “Read” box just above (reading the sector into the computer), and then press the “Start” button.
2. The Victoria program will begin the procedure of checking the surface of the hard drive, recording the number of sectors with different read latencies. As you can see, using Victoria is not so difficult.
3. The longer the delay, the worse the hard drive performs. this place, and the greater the likelihood of problems arising. After the procedure is completed, you will see a complete picture of the performance of your hard drive, and you will also see the statistical results of the performed remap.
4. A diamond with arrows allows you to move the cursor over a map of the disk surface and view sector statistics; other parameters can be left at default.
5. You can see what working with the “Test” tab looks like visually in the video.

The next Advanced tab presents the Sec field data, and the MBR on or off indicator turns on and off recognition of OS partitions.

IN last tab Setup presents various system settings programs.

Using Victoria - briefly about the main thing

Thus, for the program to work, we need to select required disk in the “Standard” tab, get its indicators in the “Smart” tab (this does not work on all hard drives), and then go through the Test by selecting the “Read” and “Remap” options. After the test is completed, you will receive statistics on the results obtained.

Conclusion

Even though latest update"Victoria" dates back to 2008, this software product Works great on Windows 7 and newer operating versions Windows systems. At the same time, it is of greatest value to service center specialists, allowing them to effectively monitor and restore the functionality of many hard drives. If you notice malfunctions in the operation of your hard drive, then you have a great opportunity to try Victoria’s functionality in action, and see from your own experience the practicality and convenience of this program.