Hard Drive diagnostic software

[joker]

Got a friend of mine who's computer keeps rebooting and the computer says that it can't find the HD. Any suggestions about a good program for checking to see if the HD is going bad (and if so, perhaps fix it)?

[DrPop]

Can you see the HDD in the BIOS first? That would be the ideal place to start. See if the BIOS is even recognizing the HDD. If so, then you could run a program off a proprietary boot ROM - WD, Seagate, they each have their own that you can download and then extract to make a bootable floppy or CD or USB boot drive, etc. The thing is, sometimes they will only work with their own hardware, so make sure you know the brand and model of the HDD.
Hope that helps a little.

[Mr. Hankey]

Once you reach the state of physical failure no software package is going to help you. At that point it becomes a matter of recovering the data from backup or paying huge $$$ to have the data recovered professionally.

I recently had a similar situation that hit my drive back in Dec.

[Fire$torm]

Replacement of the drive depends on what the problem is. If the drive has bad sectors where the OS is located than the drive can be fully recovered as long as the unit has enough reserve sectors to replace the bad ones. otherwise the drive will just mark the bad sectors to restrict access to them and then report the new smaller capacity. If the bad sectors are where it stores both of its Master Boot Records (MBR) than the drive is toast. If the problem is mechanical failure of the spindle motor, read/write heads or the head armatures than the drive is also toast.

To answer your question, one good utility for checking a hard drive is SpeedFan. A really cool feature of SpeedFan is the online database. When you use Speedfan to check a drive it will run the S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic and then access the database to show you how your drive compares against the list of same make and model in the database. It works really well for this.
Although HDD utilities cannot truly "restore" a drive to like new, many do a much better job of making a drive usable again then Windows ever could. Many of them are also FREE!
Try these:
(These can be had for Free)
Seagate SeaTools
IBM Drive Fitness Test
Bart's Stuff Test
Hawk-41 (Not sure if this one is freeware)

(These cost money)
Disk Commander
HDD Regenerator
HD Sentinel Pro

If you just wish to recover the data then try one of the following:
Recuva
Easus Data Recovery Wizard
(This is my rapidshare link I just created because this is a free license version of Easus's Commercial product that they made available for a short time about a year ago. The license is builtin so as long as you do not upgrade its free )

Hope this helps.

Edit: Forgot to mention that although rare the northbridge, PCI controller(s) or the ATA/SATA controllers on that MB could have gone kaput. Try moving the drive to a working computer and run the utils I listed above. This way you have a better chance of discovering if its the drive or the MB.