What is a surface test? How to perform a disk surface test on HDD/SSD in Windows 10?

Updated By

Linda 

Written By

Linda 

Last Updated on April 19, 2024

As a hard drive ages, it may develop more and more bad sectors. Data on these sectors can become corrupted or lost. How to check if a hard drive has bad sectors? You can perform a surface scan with a well-designed hard drive surface testing tool.

What is a disk surface test?

A surface test is a bad sector scan of a hard drive (HDD or SSD). A disk surface test scans the surface of the hard drive, looking for bad sectors and marking them so that the computer will know not to use them in the future.

We recommend using a disk partition tool with surface testing feature. It can detect bad sectors by scanning the hard drive and mark them in red so that the system knows not to use these areas.

This partition manager allows reading from bad sectors, but writing to them is not possible. Data stored on bad sectors remains accessible.

How to Perform a Disk Surface Test on Windows 10 Using Partition Master Tool

Please free download and install Partition Master, then follow the steps below to do hard drive surface test and check bad sectors on hard drive.

If you have a disk with many bad sectors and want to migrate your system to an SSD or HDD, you can also do this easily with a partition tool.

Step 1: Launch Partition Master. Right-click the disk that you want to check, and then click “Surface Test.”

Step 2: The operation will be performed immediately, and all bad sectors will be marked in red.

It's easy to perform a surface test with Partition Master.

The tool Partition Master provides the easiest solution to perform a hard drive surface test with just one click. This all-in-one disk management tool makes it easy to partition HDD/SSD for better system performance.

• Migrate free space directly from one disk to another, for example, to move space from D drive to C drive.
• Resize/Move partitions, create, format, delete, and merge partitions.
• Copy and clone entire hard drive to another, even if the target partition is smaller than the source.
• Convert a logical partition to primary, or vice versa, FAT to NTFS partition, MBR disk to GPT, or GPT to MBR disk.
• Wipe all data on a hard drive securely to prevent data leakage or recovery.
• Run an HDD benchmark to evaluate your computer's performance.