A user contacted the help desk about files that disappeared from a laptop.

S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) is a feature of hard drives that monitors various parameters, such as temperature, error rate, spin-up time, and seek time, to assess the health and performance of the drive. S.M.A.R.T. can also predict the likelihood of failure based on the historical trends of these parameters. A technician can check the S.M.A.R.T. information of a hard drive using various tools, such as the BIOS, the operating system, or third-party software. Checking the S.M.A.R.T. information can help the technician diagnose the cause and severity of the drive corruption and determine the best course of action.

CHKDSK (Check Disk) is a command-line utility that scans the file system and the disk surface for errors and attempts to fix them. CHKDSK can also recover readable data from bad sectors and mark them as unusable. A technician can run CHKDSK on a corrupt drive using various options, such as /f (fix errors), /r (recover data), or /x (dismount the drive). Running CHKDSK can help the technician repair the drive corruption and retrieve the missing files.