How to Use Victoria to Test and Fix Your Hard Disk in 2023

👍 Watch how to check a hard, external or SSD drive for surface defects or bad sectors, and fix them with the free program called Victoria.

• 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

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