Windows Surface Scanner

Windows Surface Scanner is a simple but powerful utility capable of scanning your hard drives for bad sectors. As the name implies, it is a scan-only tool, so repairing any found issues requires the installation of a secondary program.

The setup procedure is rapid and does not need special input from the user. The tool's interface is represented by a clean window with a well-organized layout, where you can click a button to mount all hard drives.

The physical media list displays the bus type, media model and size, along with the serial number for each HDD. Just select one to start the scanning procedure.

During this time you can view total folders and files, remaining time, errors, and the currently processed block. Any bad sectors are marked in a separate list, while log details are shown on the bottom part of the screen, containing the task type, date, time, and message. The report can be directly printed. There are no other notable options available through this program.

It may take a while to complete a scan job, depending on the size of the selected hard drive, but Windows Surface Scanner is reasonable, and it recognizes SSDs too. The program did not hang, crash or show error messages; we haven't come across any issues throughout our tests.

Although it does not offer a solution to fixing HDD bad sectors, Windows Surface Scanner does a pretty good job when it comes to identifying them. Since it's generally ease to use, the software utility should please the entire audience.