MHDD: Bootable CD image is the most popular freeware program for low-level HDD Diagnostics.

MHDD is the small and powerful freeware tool to work with hard drives at the lowest possible level. First version was released in 2000 by me, Dmitry Postrigan. It was able to make surface scan of an IDE drive in CHS mode. My main objective was to develop well-known and trusted HDD diagnostic tool.

Now MHDD is much more than just diagnostic. You can do anything with MHDD: diagnose your drive, access raw sectors, manage S.M.A.R.T. (SMART) and other drive parameters such as acoustic management, security, Host Protected Area. You can even send your own commands to a drive using very simple linear scripting engine.

MHDD supports these interfaces: IDE, Serial ATA, SCSI. Also there is a possibility to access an USB storage, there are drivers for emulation (USB->SCSI).

This software can make precise diagnostic of the mechanical part of a drive, view SMART attributes, perform Low-level format, bad sector repair, different tests and tens of other functions.

MHDD is the small and powerful freeware Tool to work with hard drives at the lowest possible level. First version was released in 2000 by me, Dmitry Postrigan. It was able to make surface scan of an IDE drive in CHS mode. My main objective was to develop well-known and trusted HDD diagnostic tool.

Now MHDD is much more than just diagnostic. You can do anything with MHDD: diagnose your drive, access raw sectors, manage S.M.A.R.T. (SMART) and other drive parameters such as Acoustic management, security, Host Protected Area.

What is inside of MHDD package
mhdd.exe Main executable
mhdd.hlp This file is used by MHDD to display help
batch/sample.mba Sample batch script to run tests without an operator
scripts/test Sample script for sending commands
cfg/mhdd.cfg Here MHDD stores its configuration

After the first run log/mhdd.log file will be created automatically. This is the main log file, everything is logged there.
If you download and extract a boot floppy or CD image you will have DR-DOS system files too.

Platform requirements and supported hardware
Platform:
* Intel Pentium or higher CPU
* 4 megabytes of RAM
* DR-DOS, MSDOS version 6.22 and higher
* Any boot device (USB, CDROM, FDD, HDD)
* A keyboard

IDE/SATA Controllers:
* Any integrated into motherboard north bridge (addresses: 0x1Fx for primary channel, 0x17x for secondary channel)
* PCI UDMA boards (detected automatically): HPT, Silicon Image, Promise, ITE, ATI and so on. Even some RAID boards are supported. In this case MHDD works with each physical drive separately
* UDMA/RAID controllers integrated into motherboard as additional chip

Hard disk drives
* Any IDE or Serial-ATA drive with size bigger than 600Mbytes, in other words, LBA mode is supported in full. This is because I have removed whole CHS code since version 2.9
* Any IDE or Serial-ATA drive with size lower than 8388607 TBytes, in other words, LBA48 mode is supported in full
* Any SCSI drive with sector size 512-528 bytes
* IDE drive should operate in master mode, and no slave devices should be attached. Please configure all drives you are planning to work with as master devices.

Other devices
Any SCSI removable media such as tape, CDROM. Maximum sector size for such devices is 4096 bytes

Command line switches
/NOPINGPONG Disable some sounds
/DISABLEBIOS Disable ERASE through BIOS
/DISABLESCSI Disable SCSI engine
/ENABLEPRIMARY Enable Pimary IDE/SATA channel
/RO Run MHDD on write-protected storage (disable logging and temp files creation)

The license of this software is Freeware, you can free download and free use this boot cd software.