How to Use Victoria to Test and Fix Your Hard Disk
Hello!
This video will show you how to check a hard, external or SSD drive for surface defects
or bad sectors, and fix them with the free program called Victoria.
Use the link in the description of this video to download this program, and then:
• Start Victoria as Administrator.
• In the Standard tab that opens we can see the list of all drives connected to this
computer, and information on them.
It includes drive name, number of clusters, memory and the motherboard connector the drive
is using.
• The SMART tab shows the drive status, namely its current SMART values.
To see it, click on Get SMART and Victoria will show in the right window the current
drive status.
Please note that SMART is not supported for USB drives.
The window in the left shows the list of attributes with their values.
The most important values are those shown in Tresh and RAW columns.
Tresh is the value that an attribute has to reach to be recognized as critical.
RAW is the most important indicator for evaluation of the drive status.
It contains real values directly telling you about the disk health.
There are many SMART attributes, and all of them are important.
But in our case, the following items will be the most important for quick evaluation:
1 – frequency of read errors.
There are many of them, but it’s not critical because this number coincides with the attribute.
195 – the number of errors fixed by hardware means
5 – the number of sectors reallocated by the hard drive to a reserved area.
In our case, there are none - 0.
187 – the number of sectors to be reallocated.
There are also none - 0.
196 – the number of reallocation operations.
None.
If values in these attributes were higher than zero, or if they were not corrected with
hardware means in time, it would indicate there are problems with the drive.
• Now let us move to the most important tab Tests which actually tests the disk for
bad sectors.
Let us start the test and look at it in detail while the program is working.
To do it, click on Start.
This is where you can set the beginning and the end of the tested area, which is by default
set to cover the entire drive: these are fields Start LBA - End LBA.
You can also choose what the program does after the test, choose a test type and so
on.
For a simple test, don’t change anything.
The principle is like this: the drive is divided into sectors having similar length, and the
program sends a request to every sector.
The longer time it takes for a sector to respond, the more likely it is to fail.
This problem can be caused by both physical wear of the hard drive and wrong use.
Bad sectors can be hidden by replacing them with good sectors from the drive’s reserved
area.
Before the test begins, choose one of the options: Ignore, Remap, Erase, Restore.
o In the Ignore mode, the program analyses and represents information.
At the moment, we started testing in this mode.
o In the Remap (reassign) mode, the program replaces damaged or bad sectors with good
sectors from the drive’s reserved area; o With the help of Restore mode, you can try
restoring the sectors damaged at the software level;
o In the Erase mode, the program tries to write data into the damaged sector and use
it further.
This mode is recommended to experienced users only.
As you can see, Victora analyses the drive and shows the number of sectors in categories
depending on their response time.
This information is also shown graphically in the left window.
The sectors shown in orange are supposed to have problems, while red or blue ones are
damaged, i.e. bad sectors.
Green sectors have a certain response delay but they don’t need correction yet.
After the testing is over and it shows some damaged sectors, you can do the following:
• You can go over the drive in the Remap mode.
• If there are bad sectors left after this operation, the drive can be tested again,
this time in the Restore mode.
To do it, choose the necessary mode and click the Start button again to begin.
You should understand that Victoria is a very useful utility but it cannot eliminate all
problems with your hard drive; its task is to test a working drive without physical damage
and fix bad sectors at the software level.
Victoria cannot fix a worn-out or physically damaged drive.
You can use Hetman Partition Recovery to recover data lost because of bad or damaged sectors
in your hard drive; find the link in the description.
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If you have any questions, leave a comment to ask one.
Thank you for watching and good luck!