In a DOS box, entering smartctl -a sda (or sdb, sdc, or the like) will tell you everything you need to know about your hard drive’s SMART status–if you can read the sometimes overlapping information. If you love the command line, SMART Monitoring Tools might be for you. Several capable utilities allow you to view the information. Unfortunately, although many BIOSs will relay the basic “Hey, I’m okay (or not)” information to you when you boot the PC, Windows 7 doesn’t provide a way to access the details. Today’s hard drives have a self-analysis feature that keeps tabs on the drive’s health. SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) My other favorite freebie is Easeus Partition Manager Home: It’s professional in appearance and has all the features I generally need. Offering an extremely small footprint and very quick boots, Partition Logic seems to work fine, at least with internal IDE drives. You can also minimize DiskMon to your system tray where it acts as a disk light, presenting a green icon when there is disk-read activity and a red icon when there is disk-write activity. You need to visit the command prompt twice during the boot process, but I have on occasion found that GParted Live boots when the Parted Magic disc will not–and vice versa. DiskMon is an application that logs and displays all hard disk activity on a Windows system. If you don’t need memory testing, or if you just want an alternative Linux partitioning boot disc, GParted Live is a slightly lighter-weight boot disc that also supports booting from a USB flash drive or an external hard drive.

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