Hard Disk Monitoring

Hi,

I was reading a bunch of stuff online about the Host Protected Area (HPA) and Device Configuration Overlay (DCO) settings on HDDs, and was curious as to how HD Sentinel handles them as I couldn't find any mention of it in the help files. Does HDS detect them, and if so, does it display a notification to the user if it is detected?

Thanks!

I can confirm Hard Disk Sentinel handles them correctly - which means those are areas are not touched and only the complete user-addressible sectors are verified and tested (which includes non-partitioned but addressable sectors too in addition to the current partitions).

As these features are often used by OEM manufacturers / system integrators (for example to store recovery partitions / data which can be reloaded) Hard Disk Sentinel does not "warn" the user about possible "lost" disk capacity as it may be important not only in the case of a system failure (when restore may be required) but also to special settings / conditions / functions of the BIOS (or the manufacturer-specific recovery tools) which may rely on the presence and size of such HPA / DCO areas.

Hard Disk Sentinel detects if the complete capacity of the hard disk is not available / not addressable if this can cause problems, for example data corruption / data loss. This is relatively common if newer hard disk used with older disk controllers (or their older drivers) or older USB adapters / enclosures (see: http://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_cas ... orrect.php for more information) but this does not include if capacity is hidden because of HPA / DCO features.