Sunday, March 8, 2015

Testing Hard Drives by Paging

I recently got a drive of uncertain quality that I needed to test. I had lots of time and also needed to test for infant mortality, so I decided to actually use it as a drive for a while. However, I don't really have anything that I want to keep on a separate drive, and I can't keep this drive forever.

So, I decided to move my system's page file to the tested drive. This can be done easily by opening the Virtual Memory dialog (under System Properties → Performance Options), unchecking "automatically manage paging file size for all drives", and configuring Windows to have no paging file on the OS drive but a system-managed paging file on the tested drive.

When the testing is complete, the pagefile can be moved back onto the main drive using the same dialog. If the drive dies - as it will pretty quickly if it's bad - then the compute can be booted into Safe Mode to move the pagefile back onto the main disk. Reboots are required after changing virtual memory settings.

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