[Fixed] Hard Drive Optimized DST Check Failed

Scenario: Hard drive optimized DST check failed on a hp PC

“When I run a system extensive test on my hp PC, the test shows “Hard Drive Optimized DST Check: Not Available”, and under this line, there’s a “Hard Drive Long DST Check”. What do these two checks mean? How to fix the DST check failure? Anyone knows?”

About hard disk DST check

1. What is DST check?

DST is an abbreviation for disk self-test which is a useful program that is integrated into the majority of HP, Dell, and other branded PCs and server workstations to verify the physical integrity of your hard disk drive.

Unlike those unpleasant fitness tests, a DST is a terrific method to examine your hard drive and discover how its excellent or bad performance affects the functioning of your device. They normally activate when you boot up, silently working away to maintain the integrity of your hard disk and its components because they're already installed on most new PCs.

2. Short DST & Long DST

DSTs are classified into two types: short DSTs and lengthy DSTs. As their titles suggest, one test takes longer than the other and examines the hard disk in more depth.

▶ Short DST check
Short DST just tests the key components, such as your control board, motor, platters, read/write heads, and so on. If all of the key components perform within acceptable limits, the short DST will be completed; if any of the components fail, the system will notify you that the short DST failed. The brief DST, which is normally conducted automatically upon startup, is only a fast review of your hard drive and only lasts a few minutes; you may still use the disk throughout it.

▶ Long DST check
The long DST performs all of the functions of the short DST, plus a thorough analysis of the data contained on your platters. Long DST can detect disk corruption and other faults that a short DST cannot because of the more thorough testing. When operating a lengthy DST, your device cannot do any additional functions, as opposed to a short DST.

3. Hard drive short DST check failed warning

If your HP/Dell PC encounters a hard drive short DST check failure, the error message "short DST failed" will most likely display when you boot your computer. These messages may contain codes such as 0146, 0142, and 0141. These numbers indicate that there is a problem with one of your drive's primary portions.

These cautions, however, are readily disregarded, as are most pop-up messages. You may even shut the window without reading the message or realizing it's a genuine alert. However, other symptoms such as a blank screen, failure to startup, uninvited rebooting, or full inability to operate will arise.

How to fix hard drive optimized DST check failed?

If your device is facing these symptoms and the hard drive short DST check fails, your drive is likely to be failing. Here we list some ways to help you try to fix short DST failed issue.

Way 1. Stop all operations and check connections

The best choice is to pause all activities and seek expert advice.

For normal users, the only operative step now is to check your cable connections. Check the connections to the hard drive and motherboard to ensure that your IDE or SATA cables are correctly inserted. Although it is uncommon, loosen or broken wires might result in erroneous short or long-DST failure results.

The problem might be swiftly resolved by simply replugging or replacing the cables.

Way 2. Update the driver

If your computer can boot, you might resolve a hard drive short DST test failed result by upgrading your device driver.

Step 1. Click on the magnifying glass in the lower left-hand corner of your screen, and type in “Device Manager.”

Step 2. Open the Device Manager and double-click on “Disk drives.” Right-click on the name of your hard drive. Click on “Update driver” or “Update Driver Software”.

Step 3. When the pop-up window opens, click on the first option: Search automatically for updated driver software.

Way 3. Restore to the previous version of the drive

Step 1. Start by opening the Control Panel. Choose “System” and select “System Protection” followed by “System Restore”.

Step 2. Follow the steps as directed by the repair wizard. Select a restore point from before the short DST failure occurred.

Way 4. Replace a new hard drive

If none of the above remedies work, the final option is to replace the short DST failing HDD with a good one. You don’t need to worry about your data on the old hard drive, there is disk cloning software for you to clone all data from the old hard disk to the new disk. After the cloning, you’ll get a duplicate disk of your old disk. Nothing will lose.

If you don’t have a cloning tool on your PC, here we recommend you AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, a disk and partition manager for Windows 11/10/8/8.1/7/XP/Vista systems. This tool has a “Disk Clone Wizard” function to allow users to clone HDD/SSD/USB/SD card to another disk/card.

And if you wish to only move OS, this tool also has a “Migrate OS to SSD” function to only transfer system-related data files and partitions.

Step 1. Download this computer operating system clone software, then install and open it. In the operation bar on the top, in "Clone", select "Clone Disk".

Step 2. Choose the hard disk that you need to clone as the source disk and click "Next".

Step 3. Select another drive as the destination disk, and then click "Next".

Step 4. Then, you can check the source and destination disk in the next window or change to "Sector to Sector clone", and click the "Confirm" button to continue if there is no problem.

Here, you can also click the "Settings" button to adjust the partition size on the destination disk or tick "4k alignment" to improve the reading and writing speed of the SSD if the target drive is SSD. 

Step 5. After returning to the main interface, check the pending operation and click "Apply" and "Proceed" to commit the operation.

To sum up

If you meet the error “hard drive optimized DST check failed”, you can try the methods in this post to have a try. This post explains some basic information about the DST test, hope these contents can help you.

AOMEI Partition Assistant is a handy tool with many functions. Besides the mentioned features, you can also use it to move folders and installed apps, convert a disk to MBR/GPT without data loss, test disk speed, etc. And there is the Server Edition to serve Windows Server 2025/2022/2019/2016/2012(R2)/2008(R2)/2003 systems.