Does anyone KNOW of a good free hard driver tester that will scan for hard drive faults?  OjasMost big makers  of Hard rives offer stand alone diagnostics that can boot from a floppy.
One such utility is Sea tools from Seagate. But I need to tell you, it can do more harm that good.

My recommendation, and others who work in the industry,  is go get a new replacement hard drive if you have any reason to think the drive is not reliable. The  time it takes to recondition a failing drive is not worth it.  Even if you are  an EXPERT. The price of a new drive is now at the level of a preconditioned drive of the same size and type.
Depending on the condition of your Hard drive for TESTING such as maintaining or checking the status , Microsoft OS system has a basic diagnostic or system tool LIKE Error checking or a defragmentation PROGRAM or using defraggler. Another useful way to check the integrity of your hard drive is using chkdsk (/f/p/r) for any file system error or bad sectors. A failing hard drive would mean using the manufacturing diagnostic tool.
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