The message < >
from Howard Neil <> contains these words:
> My wife's computer has a rather obscure problem that is starting lo look
> like a hard disk problem (which may be MBR related). Yet it checks out
> fine with CHKDSK.
> I have therefore started to look for a hard disk checking utility and am
> faced with a large number of them; all claiming to be the best. Some
> free, some expensive.
> Has anyone had any experience with this type of software, please? I am
> looking for recommendations or otherwise. Or is CHKDSK really the only
> thing needed?
The best disk checking utility is the one available from the disk drive
manufacturer. However, the UBCD has a collection of various
manufacturers' disk testing tools as well as other useful utilities so
is well worth downloading and burning to CD.
If I'm not sure of the make of the hard drive, I'll choose the Seatools
utility since this will test a drive regardless of make and display the
model number of any drives it can detect so I can choose a more
appropriate utility if I'm unhappy with the limitations of Seatools and
the non Seagate/Maxtor drive.
It will still run the quick and long tests regardless, you just won't
have the option to 'repair' any bad sectors that may be discovered
during the test (a maximum of 99 at a time - hint: if you don't abort
the test on a maxtor or seagate drive before it hits this limit, you
don't get the 'repair' option at all).
It's hard to say whether it's best to run CHKDSK before or after
running the appropriate hard disk checking tool. In the case of the
SeaTools program, any bad sectors that are repaired simply loses the
data those sectors might have been storing which will corrupt files.
OTOH, as has already been said, running CHKDSK on a failing drive with
shedloads of bad sectors is also destined to end in tears, it depends on
whether data recovery is a priority or not.
If data recovery is a high priority and you have reason to believe the
drive is on its way to total failure, your best option is to clone the
disk to a new one. Unfortunately, a lot of commercial disk cloning
utilities have a tendency to hammer the failing disk in making pointless
repeat attempts to read bad sectors.
The best such cloning utility is a Linux based one called ddrescue. Its
cloning algorithm has been optimised to avoid unnecessary attempts at
copying sectors which are clearly bad. This not only speeds up the
cloning process but also maximises your chance of recovering data before
the sectors it is stored on go bad during the cloning operation itself
(an all too common event with traditional cloning tools and a failing
source drive).
HTH
--
Regards, John.
Please remove the "ohggcyht" before replying.
The address has been munged to reject Spam-bots.
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