How to use Victoria (program for hard disks). Victoria HDD: how to use

Oddly enough, sometimes the "fall" of the operating system does occur without user intervention. The thing is that such an unfortunate outcome is greatly contributed by the incredible density of recording on modern hard drives, as well as the complexity of modern SATA interfaces. Even a backup copy of the system does not always save.

Introduction to the topic

The cause is damage to hard disk sectors. Such zones in the environment of professional "computer specialists" are called "Bad sector" or "Bad block" (from the English word Bad, that is bad). The trouble is that the presence of such zones very often makes it absolutely impossible not only to restore the OS, but even its final installation with the formatting of the media. In this case, it is necessary to replicate the "broken" sectors for their "restoration".

We did not accidentally take the word "Restoration" in quotation marks. The fact is that Remap is a replacement of a bad sector with a similar block from the reserve, which is always available on all hard disks. As a rule, all this is done by system tools in a fully automatic mode, but for a number of reasons some hard drives do not support this possibility (automatic replacement).

Special programs

It is here that specialized utilities become necessary. One of the best and revered of them is considered to be "Victoria". This wonderful program saved hard disks even in the doldrums of DOS, and now many experts prefer to run it in this mode. Today we will learn how to use Victoria.

Beginning of work

First of all, you need to make a bootable flash drive. Of course, traditionally the utility is launched from a floppy disk, and for this the manufacturer even offers the file MAKEDISK.BAT, but there is practically no drive for floppy disks today on the computers of home users.

Tips for writing a boot image to a flash drive are available on the official website of the program, so we will not dwell on this.

Booting from the media (previously setting the BIOS in the desired boot option), you can contemplate the classic test interface of the program, inherited from its distant ancestors of the DOS times. We continue to learn how to use the program Victoria.

Important aspects

By default, you will be asked to download Victoria Russian for Desktop. This version is the first in the boot line, designed for desktop computers. If you have a laptop, you should select: ... for Notebook, then press Enter.

Define the disk connection interface

In the first window, press the F2 key to automatically determine the type of hard disk interface. If the program has not managed to do this in automatic mode, you will have to do it manually. To do this, press the P key (English), then a window with a list of interfaces appears. Select the desired one, using the arrow keys, then click on Enter.

In general, the program Victoria in Russian came out relatively recently, so it's better to immediately remember the English terms, as in older versions they are found everywhere.

Attention!

If you have an old hard drive with an IDE interface, you should be extremely attentive to the last action. In particular, if you do not know the difference between Primary Master and Secondary Slave, it's better to quit the program, since all your subsequent actions can lead to irreversible consequences, up to the damage of the hard disk itself.

So, how to use Victoria?

Getting Started

Once you have selected the correct hard disk and pressed Enter, a message appears at the bottom of the program window that the presets have been successfully completed. After that, press the F2 button on the keyboard. A passport of the selected hard drive will immediately appear in front of you.

To start the scan of the disk surface, press the F4 button. The HDD-scan menu appears. In it, you should specify the parameters that will guide the program, performing a hard disk scan.

By default, it is suggested to scan the entire surface of the disk (the Start and End positions). If desired, you can change the value (in bytes) to the volume that you want to check. In addition, you should select the option "Linear Reading", Ignore Bad Blocks and Change end of test. The plotting can also be disabled, especially since it is recommended by the developers of the Victoria HDD: many users know how to use the program, but the decoding of this information is not for amateurs.

Note!

However, in most cases, the active system partition is at the very "beginning" of the disk, so in some cases it is quite acceptable (for the sake of reducing scan time) to specify a smaller amount of checked disk space.

By the way, you can specify this value not only in bytes, but also in percentage, which can greatly simplify the diagnostic procedure. In addition, in the latest versions of the program, it is possible to set the volume in gigabytes. But! For programmatic limitations, the limit of one terabyte can not be exceeded.

Before using the Victoria program, we would recommend once again to recall the risks that careless handling of hard disk partitions brings. Do not forget about it!

About read modes

In addition to Linear, you can put the "Random" mode and apply the option "Butterfly" (Butterfly). With the help of the last two methods, you can get much more reliable test results, but we strongly do not recommend using them without extreme need. First, the test time itself increases by about 10 (!) Times. Secondly, which is much worse, these techniques dramatically increase the wear rate of the mechanical part of the spindle disk. The old hard drive from such "executions" can simply fail.

Since working with the program Victoria is for the sake of extending the life of the drive, this outcome is very sad ...

There is no right to mistake

After selecting the line Ignore Bad Blocks, press the space bar, changing the value to BB = Advanced REMAP. If you carefully read the introduction, you already know the meaning of this term. But! If you click "Space" again, the option BB = Erase 256 sect will be displayed. This mode erases (!) Data from the hard drive! Extremely useful when preparing a hard drive for sale, but can play a very evil joke with an inexperienced user ... Once again, warn: before you use Victoria, again, check everything!

All! After pressing the Enter key, the same disk check begins , for which everything was started. The number of bad sectors found on the hard disk will be displayed in the lower right part of the working window. If they are found, their automatic replacement will be made for reserve sectors ("Remap").

To exit the program when you are finished, click on X (X). Here's how to use Victoria.