Phenquestions
While it is always a good idea to regularly check your Hard Disk Health for Errors & Bad Sectors, it is equally important to monitor the Hard Disk regularly, if you don't want to be caught unawares by a hard disk failure for no apparent reason. Hard Disks these days, use Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology or SMART to monitor its health and send out signals if it is failing.
To check the status of your Hard Disk health, you can use the WMIC or Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line. The WMIC is a command-line and scripting interface that simplifies the use of Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and systems managed through WMI. Using the WMI Commands,, it can help you carry out several administrative tasks, including, for instance, finding out the computer model name or the serial number of your Windows PC.
Check Hard Disk Health
To check your Hard Disk Health natively in Windows 10/8/7, open a command prompt window.
First, type the following and hit Enter:
wmic
Then type types the following and hit Enter:
diskdrive get status
If the status of your hard disk is fine, you will see a message, OK.
If Windows faces problems in retrieving the SMART information, it will probably mean that the hard disk may face issues and this will be reflected in the message that is returned.
In the eventuality that your hard disk status is not OK, it might be a good idea to keep a watch on the noises that a dying hard disk makes, and back up all your data natively or by using some free third-party backup software.
It might then be a good idea to consider changing your hard disk, as a dying disk can result in data corruption too - before it eventually dies.
You may want to take a look at these posts:
- What is a Solid State Drive & what are its advantages over Hard Disk Drive
- Thinking of upgrading your Hard Drive? Recycle your old Hard Drive as a portable
- How to dispose off Old Computers safely & securely.
