Easy Disk Checker: Disk and Flash Drive Utility

Easy Disk Checker is an easy-to-use Windows utility for working with disks and flash drives at the "physical" level, regardless of the file system or lack thereof. Supported devices:

• SATA HDDs
• External USB drives
• NVMe and SATA SSDs
• USB flash drives and memory cards

The application is designed as a single executable EXE file; it requires no installation and is ready to work immediately after unpacking from the ZIP archive.

version 4.4.0

Getting Started and Interface

At startup, the interface language is set according to Windows language settings, and a check for a new version is performed, offering to download the update if one is found on the server.

Upon launching the program, the main window opens with the "Disk List" button active. Clicking it initiates scanning of buses (SATA, USB, NVMe) and displays a list of physical devices available in the system. For each disk, the model, serial number, firmware version, physical capacity, LBA addressing, and the volume label assigned in the operating system are displayed.

Important: To ensure the program works correctly (accessing physical devices and reading S.M.A.R.T.), it must be run as Administrator.

When a disk is selected, its logical structure (MBR/GPT partitions, file systems) is displayed in the lower part of the window. If reading the 0th sector (Master Boot Record) fails, details about the identified problem are displayed.

Right-clicking here opens a context menu to launch the Hex Editor for a visual assessment of sector contents and editing with the ability to save changes.

WARNING: Incorrect data modification in the HEX editor (e.g., in the partition table or MBR) may lead to partition loss and inability to boot the OS.

After populating the list of physical disks, the following buttons become active:

• "Check Disk"
• "Create Image"
• "Write Image"

Disk Check

Selecting the desired drive in the "Detected Disks" window and clicking the "Check Disk" button opens a summary information window divided into functional blocks:

• Device Information — model, serial number, firmware version, capacity, RPM (if supported), internal model of the external drive, VID\PID of flash drives, presumed microcontroller model (helpful for finding service utilities for flashing), and buttons:
  "Benchmark"
  "Fake Test" (available only for flash drives and memory cards).
• Current Status — express read check in LBA areas at the beginning, middle, and end of the disk, and buttons:
  "Full Read"
  "Full Write"
• Security and Features — displays information about ATA password, HPA (Host Protected Area), and Seagate FARM (available only on modern Seagate drives) if applicable.
• S.M.A.R.T. Self-Test Table Display, collapsed by default; not supported on USB Flash drives and memory cards.

Read Image

The process creates a full sector-by-sector image of the selected disk without compression or modification. All you need to do is select the path and filename; the *.bin extension will be assigned automatically.

Clicking "Cancel" interrupts the process; the partially read image file is not deleted. Windows "Sleep Mode" is blocked during the reading process.

Write Image

Use with caution! Writing an image to the selected disk is functionally identical to reading, except that two warning windows are displayed before starting, as erroneously writing an image to the wrong target disk will lead to irreversible overwriting of the written sectors.

Benchmark

Four read iterations are launched on the selected disk in different areas, displaying the average calculated speed in Mbit/sec.

Fake Test

This function becomes active if a USB flash drive or memory card is selected.

It is used for so-called "flash drives from AliExpress" or other marketplaces. The algorithm detects flash drives with artificially "inflated" capacity. If the actual capacity matches the claimed one, a corresponding message is displayed:

Full Read

The utility performs a linear read to search for bad blocks and bad sectors, sequentially reading every sector of the disk from beginning to end. For convenience, sectors are grouped into dynamic blocks.

During disk testing, the map of blocks is filled in the left part of the window according to the legend. The right part displays information about the automatically selected block size, current sector address, instantaneous and average read speeds, and the estimated time until the test completes.

Full Write

Identical to reading, but a message warning about the permanent loss of overwritten sector contents is displayed before the test begins.

WARNING: DESTRUCTIVE FUNCTION! All data on the target disk will be irreversibly overwritten by the image content. The target disk's file system will be destroyed.

Running the write test briefly can resolve issues where a partition cannot be removed by standard Windows tools.

Removing Microsoft Storage Pool (Microsoft Storage Space Device)

Based on requests from colleagues and users, we added the ability to remove the "Microsoft Storage Space Device" flag (also known as Microsoft Storage Pool) from HDDs or SSDs. This is created by Windows in the specific wizard, and it cannot be easily fixed via Disk Management.

The key change in the logical structure is located in the second sector (at offset 0x400), where the pool layout is written.

Using a pool of two physical disks as an example, the utility window shows them as two physical disks and one logical unit — a virtual overlay in the form of MsftStorage Space. All that is needed to remove it is to identify the array disks by matching strings in the MBR analysis window and run a "Full Write" test on each, interrupting it immediately after it starts.

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