Eeyore wrote in
:



James Sweet wrote:

There's some really good tools out there, unfortunately I forget the
name of the one I used, but I found a free demo of it online a couple
years ago. Google for data recovery software and try one out. A word of
caution though, if the data is valuable, take the drive to a pro, you
risk destroying it beyond recovery by attempting to recover it
yourself.

Thanks for the input. There's nothing on it of such value that I can't
live without it !

I am however curious since I've not come across such a fault before and
I'd like to attempt a fix if only as an exercise.

I've never previously 'lost' or needed to 're-install' an installation
of Windows you see. Short of total mechanical/electrical failure I'd
like to maintain that record.

I use r-studio to recover data.
Left one drive running last night. Lots of bad sectors 'unable to read
after 10 retries'.

The computer seems to freeze when it is accessing such a drive.
It may take several days to finish making an image of this 76 GB drive.

Then r-studio can scan the image and recover files [except for the data
lost on the bad sectors, of course.

I usually make an image first, for several reasons:
1) it preserves the hard drive for further tries
2) it is faster to recover from the image when there are lots of hardware
failures.
3) you can try different sectoring schemes to recover data when the
directory has been trashed.

As for fixing the drive, a low level format might 'fix' the drive by
teaching it to ignore the bad sectors, but if it has been losing sectors
due to mechanical damage to the disk surface, the problem will continue to
get worse. The drive is unreliable.

Check the mfg web site, the drive may be in warranty!
You may get a free replacement drive.

If the data on the drive is very valuable, there are companies that will
recover data, even from damaged drives. It isn't cheap.

I remember a company in canada that would return the drive repaired with
data recovered for a flat fee of less than 1000 dollars [no charge if they
couldn't recover your drive].




--
bz 73 de N5BZ k

please pardon my infinite ignorance, the set-of-things-I-do-not-know is an
infinite set.

remove ch100-5 to avoid spam trap

Eeyore wrote:
Never seen this before.

A HDD of mine (IBM Deskstar 20GB IC35L020AVER07-0) 'died' when I restarted

You mean an IBM Deathstar? They're notorious for dying.
Just tossed a couple dead 60G's...

Franc Zabkar wrote:

Eeyore put finger to keyboard and composed:

I then used XP's command.com and got the cryptic message 'cyclic redundancy
error'.

I don't use Windows XP, but I know that its command interpreter is
actually cmd.exe.

What's this then ?

Type of file: MS-DOS Application
Description: command
Location: C:\WINDOWS\system32
Size: 49.4 KB (50,620 bytes)


Graham

Spurious Response wrote:

Eeyore wrote:
Spurious Response wrote:
Eeyore wrote:
Spurious Response wrote:

Jeez! 300GB UDMA drives are $59 now for the high end.#

Made by whom ?

Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor...

All of which are brands history has noted for premature failure.

Could you make any more of a nebulous remark? For one thing all drives
eventually fail. "Premature failure" is about as off the wall as it
gets.

In the case of Seagate, a case I well remember, both the original SCSI Barracuda
drive I'd bought *and* its replacement died with a month of installation. I
certainly call that premature.

Graham

Clint Sharp wrote:

Eeyore writes

I've never previously 'lost' or needed to 're-install' an installation of
Windows you see. Short of total mechanical/electrical failure I'd like to
maintain that record.
Get a copy of Spinrite. It works for errors like the one you have. There
are other tools which are for filesystem corruption and lost
files/partitions but it sounds like you have something a little 'lower
level' than that.

Ah yes. I've seen that at grc.com.

I didn't know it did stuff like that. Thanks.

Graham

Franc Zabkar wrote:

"Michael Kennedy" put finger to keyboard and composed:
"Clint Sharp" wrote
Franc Zabkar writes:

I don't use Windows XP, but I know that its command interpreter is
actually cmd.exe.
Umm, actually, XP has command.com as well.

Oddly cmd.exe and command.com behave slightly differently under xp, but they
both do the same thing.

All the references I can find say that one should use cmd.exe wherever
possible and that command.com should be used only for DOS apps that
have trouble running under XP. One major difference appears to be that
the latter doesn't support long file names. Another is that XP batch
language is much more powerful than that afforded by command.com. In
any case, cmd.exe is XP's native CLI, and command.com is for Win9x and
DOS.

Maybe so but I've always used command.com and it works just fine.

Graham

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 08:28:48 +0100, Clint Sharp
wrote:

In message , Franc Zabkar
writes
I don't use Windows XP, but I know that its command interpreter is
actually cmd.exe.
Umm, actually, XP has command.com as well.


Uh... command.com is the old DOS command interpreter.

cmd.exe is the NT "DOS Virtual Machine" shell.

Different command interpreters can be invoked from within this shell,
including command.com

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 09:46:51 +0100, feebo wrote:

hmmm... not convinced on the maxtor side of things... I have read
loads but I use lots of maxtor kit and have only had a single drive
fail (80G) years back.


While I have had loads of Maxtor failures, and would never buy another.
Yet Seagate just bought them.

Just proves his stats are bull. ALL drive makers have drive failures.
Including his precious make.

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 12:31:40 +0100, Eeyore
wrote:



Spurious Response wrote:

Eeyore wrote:
Spurious Response wrote:
Eeyore wrote:
Spurious Response wrote:

Jeez! 300GB UDMA drives are $59 now for the high end.#

Made by whom ?

Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor...

All of which are brands history has noted for premature failure.

Could you make any more of a nebulous remark? For one thing all drives
eventually fail. "Premature failure" is about as off the wall as it
gets.

In the case of Seagate, a case I well remember, both the original SCSI Barracuda
drive I'd bought *and* its replacement died with a month of installation. I
certainly call that premature.



Did Seagate promptly replace them for you?

Spurious Response wrote:

Eeyore wrote:
Spurious Response wrote:
Eeyore wrote:
Spurious Response wrote:
Eeyore wrote:
Spurious Response wrote:

Jeez! 300GB UDMA drives are $59 now for the high end.#

Made by whom ?

Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor...

All of which are brands history has noted for premature failure.

Could you make any more of a nebulous remark? For one thing all drives
eventually fail. "Premature failure" is about as off the wall as it
gets.

In the case of Seagate, a case I well remember, both the original SCSI Barracuda
drive I'd bought *and* its replacement died with a month of installation. I
certainly call that premature.


Did Seagate promptly replace them for you?

I should damn well think so. They had 3 year warranties.

Graham

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 03:49:05 -0400, "Michael Kennedy"
wrote:


"Clint Sharp" wrote in message
...
In message , Franc Zabkar
writes
I don't use Windows XP, but I know that its command interpreter is
actually cmd.exe.
Umm, actually, XP has command.com as well.

--
Clint Sharp

Oddly cmd.exe and command.com behave slightly differently under xp, but they
both do the same thing.

There's a commands.exe (in c:\HP\BIN) on this Vista spit machine
that seems to be similar similar (if not identical) to cmd.exe.

Note that cmd.exe (and my commands.exe) allow you to use the up-arrow
key (or F3) to copy the previous command (as well as other things) so
it's a lot more pleasant to use than the stripped command.com.

Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
--
"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com

Meat Plow wrote:

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 04:12:19 +0000, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

Eeyore wrote:

Never seen this before.

A HDD of mine (IBM Deskstar 20GB IC35L020AVER07-0) 'died' when I restarted
Windows (XP btw FWIW). Windows shut down OK seemingly but wouldn't restart.


They aren't called "Deathstars" just to be cute.

Fujitsu was another deathstar. I've ordered Dell Poweredge servers with
hot swap RAID 5 in the past that were delivered with brand new bad Fujitsu
drives. I finally had to insist another brand when specking out new
servers.


Like other brands, they made some good drives, and some bad ones. If
they were all bad, they would have been out of the business in a hurry.
You can't name a HD brand that someone won't complain that they are all
crap. When i was building custom PCs I let people pick out whatever
they wanted. The price of each item covered the wholesale cost, labor to
install it, and profit. Amazingly, 99% of the time they would chose
whatever brand was the cheapest in the storage range they wanted.

I've never had a Fujitsu hard drive fail on me, and I've only seen a
few bad ones. I still have several good Fujitsu drives from computers I
retired, after years of nearly 4/7 operation.

Of course Fujitsu wasn't as widely used as some other brands.


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

Eeyore wrote in message ...
Never seen this before.

A HDD of mine (IBM Deskstar 20GB IC35L020AVER07-0) 'died' when I restarted
Windows (XP btw FWIW). Windows shut down OK seemingly but wouldn't restart.

It totally 'locked up' the PC with no error message. Never seen anything
quite
like that before so it took me a little while to pinpoint it. The BIOS
found the
drive OK btw.

Anyway, I got things sorted and then re-attached it as a secondary drive.

Trying to look at it, Windows Explorer 'froze' for a bit but it did load a
drive
icon eventually. However Windows Explorer was of no further help.

I then used XP's command.com and got the cryptic message 'cyclic redundancy
error'.

Any ideas what's up ? Is the drive destined for silicon hell or is it
recoverable ? I'm wondering if the system area's data's been trashed for
example.

Graham



Hitachi probably made that drive for IBM. Download the Hitachi Feature Tool.
From it, you can create a floppy boot disk with programs that access the
drive in DOS bypassing windows. If the drive has a data problem F tool will
enable you to format and I think rewrite the MBR. If it is a hardware
problem with the disk, F tool will hang also.
bg

Meat Plow wrote:
On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 15:35:29 +0000, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

Meat Plow wrote:
On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 04:12:19 +0000, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

Eeyore wrote:
Never seen this before.

A HDD of mine (IBM Deskstar 20GB IC35L020AVER07-0) 'died' when I restarted
Windows (XP btw FWIW). Windows shut down OK seemingly but wouldn't restart.

They aren't called "Deathstars" just to be cute.
Fujitsu was another deathstar. I've ordered Dell Poweredge servers with
hot swap RAID 5 in the past that were delivered with brand new bad Fujitsu
drives. I finally had to insist another brand when specking out new
servers.

Like other brands, they made some good drives, and some bad ones. If
they were all bad, they would have been out of the business in a hurry.
You can't name a HD brand that someone won't complain that they are all
crap. When i was building custom PCs I let people pick out whatever
they wanted. The price of each item covered the wholesale cost, labor to
install it, and profit. Amazingly, 99% of the time they would chose
whatever brand was the cheapest in the storage range they wanted.

I've never had a Fujitsu hard drive fail on me, and I've only seen a
few bad ones. I still have several good Fujitsu drives from computers I
retired, after years of nearly 4/7 operation.

Of course Fujitsu wasn't as widely used as some other brands.

Maybe it was just their SCSI line but I wouldn't buy another if they were
the last drive on earth.


I`ve swapped out plenty of failed Fujitsu and Maxtor drives, and not
only in PC`s. I try to only buy Quantum and Seagate drives these days
but I`m sure everyone has their own tales to tell.

RonUK

Meat Plow wrote:

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 15:35:29 +0000, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

Meat Plow wrote:

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 04:12:19 +0000, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

Eeyore wrote:

Never seen this before.

A HDD of mine (IBM Deskstar 20GB IC35L020AVER07-0) 'died' when I restarted
Windows (XP btw FWIW). Windows shut down OK seemingly but wouldn't restart.


They aren't called "Deathstars" just to be cute.

Fujitsu was another deathstar. I've ordered Dell Poweredge servers with
hot swap RAID 5 in the past that were delivered with brand new bad Fujitsu
drives. I finally had to insist another brand when specking out new
servers.


Like other brands, they made some good drives, and some bad ones. If
they were all bad, they would have been out of the business in a hurry.
You can't name a HD brand that someone won't complain that they are all
crap. When i was building custom PCs I let people pick out whatever
they wanted. The price of each item covered the wholesale cost, labor to
install it, and profit. Amazingly, 99% of the time they would chose
whatever brand was the cheapest in the storage range they wanted.

I've never had a Fujitsu hard drive fail on me, and I've only seen a
few bad ones. I still have several good Fujitsu drives from computers I
retired, after years of nearly 4/7 operation.

Of course Fujitsu wasn't as widely used as some other brands.

Maybe it was just their SCSI line but I wouldn't buy another if they were
the last drive on earth.


I never buy cutting edge hard drives. I chose somewhere in the
middle of the curve, and have never had an in warranty hard drive
failure, in over 10 years of using them.


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

bg wrote:

Hitachi probably made that drive for IBM. Download the Hitachi Feature Tool.
From it, you can create a floppy boot disk with programs that access the
drive in DOS bypassing windows. If the drive has a data problem F tool will
enable you to format and I think rewrite the MBR. If it is a hardware
problem with the disk, F tool will hang also.

Brilliant. I should have thought of that. Thanks.

Graham

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 03:02:40 +0100, in sci.electronics.design Eeyore
wrote:

snip
I'm keen to explore Linux but my results to date haven't been very promising. It seems
to me that the much-touted 'live' CDs require a fairly modern PC to run. The trouble
is that they give no indication of whether or not the PC can support it or not.

I will keep trying though. I have another 'box' in mind.

here is another box
http://www.boredstop.com/index.php?o...34&Item id=34


martin

On Jul 18, 10:46 pm, Spurious Response
wrote:
On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 03:28:08 +0100, Eeyore

wrote:
Those are live/install CDs.

Yes. And that is a good or bad thing in exactly what way ?

Keyed more toward installing. Knoppix is keyed heavily toward good auto
detect routines for hardware, and a great driver compliment. So it
nearly always gets you into the gui, and if the drive lives, you'll see
it. Burn a disc or two of it's contents and make a doorstop out of it.


well if it's a cyclic redundancy error that means that the key that
windows has on file for the data on the drive no longer matches what
the drive is reporting ergo drive is corrupted. Deskstars of that age
are notorious for dying randomly (my uncle went through 2 pairs of
drives in his raid 0 before switching to seagate 320GB SATA with a
controller card earlier this year) Desktars are known in the computer
world as deathstars for a reason. I've never personally had one die
on me but then again the 2 laptops I had previous to this one (a
thinkpad I series and a dell latitude (don't flame I was in college
when I bought the first one and it died on me and the dell was
purchased by my parents as a replacement it was used and I sold it to
buy the acer dual core i'm typing this post on) . back on point junk
the drive unless you really really need the data and go with a
seagate, WD or Maxtor drive all better drives and with prices now
falling (I live in Canada and 500GB drives are now $130) you can get ~
20-30 times the disk space for pennies hope this helps

go to grc.com and buy SpinRite - well worth the money

Strongly seconded.

Again, that was roughly my thought. In years past I'd have used Norton disktools with
some certaintly that it would find what's up. Not sure what to do now. It's formatted
as FAT(32) not NTFS if that helps.

Boot win98's DOS from a floppy and see if you can "see" the drive. Win9x is
much better at dealing with imperfect drive issues than is NT/2000/XP and
plain DOS is even better than win for drive funnies. But try SPINRITE first.

"Kevin G. Rhoads" wrote:

go to grc.com and buy SpinRite - well worth the money

Strongly seconded.

It's hardly worth $89 to resuscitate an old 20GB drive.

Graham

"Kevin G. Rhoads" wrote:

Again, that was roughly my thought. In years past I'd have used Norton disktools with
some certaintly that it would find what's up. Not sure what to do now. It's formatted
as FAT(32) not NTFS if that helps.

Boot win98's DOS from a floppy and see if you can "see" the drive. Win9x is
much better at dealing with imperfect drive issues than is NT/2000/XP and
plain DOS is even better than win for drive funnies.

Thanks for that advice.


But try SPINRITE first.

Is there a trial version ? It's $89 to buy.

Graham

"Eeyore" wrote in message
...
Is there a trial version ? It's $89 to buy.

No, but they'll gladly refund your purchase price if it doesn't work for you.
This happened to me... I had a partially-dead hard drive, and after trying
various options, bought a copy of SpinRite. It couldn't do any better, so I
e-mailed them and they did immediately credit the purchase back to my Visa.

Steve Gibson (the author) has been around forever, and while he's definitely
something of a character, he is completely honest.

Joel Kolstad wrote:

"Eeyore" wrot

Is there a trial version ? It's $89 to buy.

No, but they'll gladly refund your purchase price if it doesn't work for you.
This happened to me... I had a partially-dead hard drive, and after trying
various options, bought a copy of SpinRite. It couldn't do any better, so I
e-mailed them and they did immediately credit the purchase back to my Visa.

Steve Gibson (the author) has been around forever, and while he's definitely
something of a character, he is completely honest.

That's excellent service.

Graham

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 09:56:00 -0400, Spehro Pefhany
put finger to keyboard and
composed:

Note that cmd.exe (and my commands.exe) allow you to use the up-arrow
key (or F3) to copy the previous command (as well as other things) so
it's a lot more pleasant to use than the stripped command.com.

Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany

In Win9x you can enable command line history by typing "doskey".

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 12:23:02 +0100, Eeyore
put finger to keyboard and
composed:



Franc Zabkar wrote:

Eeyore put finger to keyboard and composed:

I then used XP's command.com and got the cryptic message 'cyclic redundancy
error'.

I don't use Windows XP, but I know that its command interpreter is
actually cmd.exe.

What's this then ?

Type of file: MS-DOS Application
Description: command
Location: C:\WINDOWS\system32
Size: 49.4 KB (50,620 bytes)


Graham

As I said, I'm basically ignorant of XP, and what little I know about
it I learnt from watching alt.msdos.batch, and by working
[reluctantly] on friends' machines.

In any case other XP users have suggested that you would be better off
using cmd.exe. In fact, if I were to include just one feature of XP in
Win98SE, it would be XP's extensions to batch language.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

Spurious Response wrote:
wrote:
Well, even IBM had SOME standards. They ran their hard drive
division into the toilet,

Bull****. Maybe from a sales POV. IBM is (was) at the pinnacle of HD
storage technology. They were the leaders which WD and Seagate followed.

Points to them for inventing Winchester technology. That said, their
so-called fix for the Deathstar drives didn't work. I got hold of one
early, lightly used and long before its first click of death. I applied
the fix and sent it home. The friend brought it back inside of a year,
clicking away, and though we managed to salvage a little data, most of it
went the way of the Deathstar.

--
"Justice Thomas pointed out that the Constitution does not waive the rights
of the individual because an elite has decided its motives are pure."
-- Paul Greenberg

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 09:56:00 -0400, Spehro Pefhany
wrote:

so
it's a lot more pleasant to use than the stripped command.com.


Command.com is NOT "stripped". It has never had a history function
without running a TSR to manage it. That would have been (not anymore)
DOSKey.

Meat Plow wrote:

Home/SOHO use is a bit different than where I placed these servers in
industrial/commercial applications.


Thanks! I guess that I just imagined the computer room with our
Prime mini-computer and racks full of Compaq servers.


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

Eeyore wrote:



msg wrote:

James Sweet wrote:
Eeyore wrote:

A HDD of mine (IBM Deskstar 20GB IC35L020AVER07-0) 'died' when I
restarted Windows (XP btw FWIW).

There's some really good tools out there, unfortunately I forget the
name of the one I used, but I found a free demo of it online a couple
years ago.

I recommend tools from Ontrack (A well-known hard disk software and data
recovery company located here in my home state);

They're still around ?

I have used Ontrack tools in the past but I imagined they'd gone the way
of all things.


I frequently use ODRN (Ontrack Data Recovery for Netware) and it has
worked wonders
to salvage file systems despite significant bad blocks and failing servo
tracks. There are other versions of ODR for other O/S platforms.
FWIW I also use an antique version of Norton Diskedit (DOS) to work at
the sector level on scsi drives.

Yes. If only a modern OS would let you do that !

I well recall a specific instance where I'd goofed slightly due to poor
documentation (jumper settings in the early days of IDE master/slave
drives) and thankfully didn't panic and **** up. Norton sorted it. But
then again, Norton wasn't Symantec back in those days.

Don't you love it when Norton says 'this drive has a damaged partition
table. Would you like to recover it ?'

Graham
If you try Knoppix you may want to use smartmontools and parted. Try them
if you get a chance.
--
JosephKK
Gegen dummheit kampfen die Gotter Selbst, vergebens.Â*Â*
--Schiller

Spurious Response wrote:

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 09:56:00 -0400, Spehro Pefhany
wrote:


so
it's a lot more pleasant to use than the stripped command.com.



Command.com is NOT "stripped". It has never had a history function
without running a TSR to manage it. That would have been (not anymore)
DOSKey.

Of course you are presuming MS-DOS; DR-DOS has had history without needing
a driver or TSR from the beginning and IIRC, the 4DOS command interpreter
did/does as well.

Regards,

Michael

On Jul 19, 1:20 pm, Eeyore
wrote:
"Kevin G. Rhoads" wrote:
Again, that was roughly my thought. In years past I'd have used
Norton disktools with
some certaintly that it would find what's up. Not sure what to
do now. It's formatted
as FAT(32) not NTFS if that helps.

Boot win98's DOS from a floppy and see if you can "see" the
drive. Win9x is
much better at dealing with imperfect drive issues than is NT/
2000/XP and
plain DOS is even better than win for drive funnies.

Thanks for that advice.

But try SPINRITE first.

Is there a trial version ? It's $89 to buy.

Graham

I had a Maxtor 300 gig drive go toes up April 13 (yep, Friday). 260
gig NTFS partition showed up as un-formatted, no partition info. My
brother suggested "GetDataBack for NTFS". It took 6 hours to walk
through the partiton and re-construct the directories so that they
could be copied to a new drive. You can try this for free and then pay
the registration to actually recover the data. Nearly everything was
salvaged. The casualties were small (50 Kb) word files but almost all
the photos and .WAV files were fine. There is also a version for FAT
for $10 less. It wasn't a fun week but it ended up better than I
hoped.

GG

wrote:

Eeyore wrote:
"Kevin G. Rhoads" wrote:

But try SPINRITE first.

Is there a trial version ? It's $89 to buy.

I had a Maxtor 300 gig drive go toes up April 13 (yep, Friday). 260
gig NTFS partition showed up as un-formatted, no partition info. My
brother suggested "GetDataBack for NTFS". It took 6 hours to walk
through the partiton and re-construct the directories so that they
could be copied to a new drive. You can try this for free and then pay
the registration to actually recover the data. Nearly everything was
salvaged. The casualties were small (50 Kb) word files but almost all
the photos and .WAV files were fine. There is also a version for FAT
for $10 less. It wasn't a fun week but it ended up better than I
hoped.

Thanks for that suggestion. I got the trial of the FAT version to see what it
does.

Graham

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 22:22:09 -0500, msg wrote:

Spurious Response wrote:

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 09:56:00 -0400, Spehro Pefhany
wrote:


so
it's a lot more pleasant to use than the stripped command.com.



Command.com is NOT "stripped". It has never had a history function
without running a TSR to manage it. That would have been (not anymore)
DOSKey.

Of course you are presuming MS-DOS; DR-DOS has had history without needing
a driver or TSR from the beginning and IIRC, the 4DOS command interpreter
did/does as well.

Regards,

Michael

DRDOS was a DOS replacement OS. Yes, it had history function.

4DOS' command processor was not called "command.com".

Meat Plow wrote:

Eeyore wrote:
wrote:
Eeyore wrote:
"Kevin G. Rhoads" wrote:

But try SPINRITE first.

Is there a trial version ? It's $89 to buy.

I had a Maxtor 300 gig drive go toes up April 13 (yep, Friday). 260
gig NTFS partition showed up as un-formatted, no partition info. My
brother suggested "GetDataBack for NTFS". It took 6 hours to walk
through the partiton and re-construct the directories so that they
could be copied to a new drive. You can try this for free and then pay
the registration to actually recover the data. Nearly everything was
salvaged. The casualties were small (50 Kb) word files but almost all
the photos and .WAV files were fine. There is also a version for FAT
for $10 less. It wasn't a fun week but it ended up better than I
hoped.

Thanks for that suggestion. I got the trial of the FAT version to see what it
does.


Do NOT use Spinrite.

What's your reason for saying that ? I'm not going to btw, but I'd like to know
your reason.

Graham

Eeyore wrote in
:



"Kevin G. Rhoads" wrote:

go to grc.com and buy SpinRite - well worth the money

Strongly seconded.

It's hardly worth $89 to resuscitate an old 20GB drive.

Depends on the data on it.

I am considering getting SpinRite. If it is half as good as they say, it
should be worth it!

Yesterday, I revived one drive and recovered a lot of data using chkdsk/f,
then chkdsk /r, then using r-studio to recover the data.

I was working with two drives that kept freezing my test computer and even
when mounted in an 'external usb' enclosure had problems.

The second drive went down hard, rebooting the windows XP computer I was
trying to access it from and then freezing the computer during boot. I had
recovered some data before it died, but the owner is going to lose a lot.

I tell my users about a guy I knew that had 9 years worth of research notes
in his car (before computers were desktop size). The car caught fire and
burned. No backups of the data. Never finished his research project. A few
years later, he blew his brains out.

Moral of the story: make backups, frequently AND store them in a different
site than where you keep your computer!





--
bz 73 de N5BZ k

please pardon my infinite ignorance, the set-of-things-I-do-not-know is an
infinite set.

remove ch100-5 to avoid spam trap

bz wrote:

Eeyore wrote
"Kevin G. Rhoads" wrote:

go to grc.com and buy SpinRite - well worth the money

Strongly seconded.

It's hardly worth $89 to resuscitate an old 20GB drive.

Depends on the data on it.

Nothing of any value I haven't already got a copy of.

I'm interested in doing it for the challenge mainly.

Graham

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 00:02:02 +0100, Eeyore
wrote:

Never seen this before.

A HDD of mine (IBM Deskstar 20GB IC35L020AVER07-0) 'died' when I restarted
Windows (XP btw FWIW). Windows shut down OK seemingly but wouldn't restart.

It totally 'locked up' the PC with no error message. Never seen anything quite
like that before so it took me a little while to pinpoint it. The BIOS found the
drive OK btw.

Anyway, I got things sorted and then re-attached it as a secondary drive.

Trying to look at it, Windows Explorer 'froze' for a bit but it did load a drive
icon eventually. However Windows Explorer was of no further help.

I then used XP's command.com and got the cryptic message 'cyclic redundancy
error'.

Any ideas what's up ? Is the drive destined for silicon hell or is it
recoverable ? I'm wondering if the system area's data's been trashed for
example.

Graham



Try IBM's drive fitness test. It may be able to repair the drive.
I've seen a lot of their drives suddenly develop lots of bad sectors.
The drive fitness test was able to reallocate them without destroying
the data on the drive. Run the extended test, then it will allow you
to run "sector repair" when it finds the first bad sector. Most of
the drives I've repaired with DFT worked fine for several years and
are still working today (although I wouldn't trust them for anything
important after that).

If you just want to be able to copy the files off the drive without
windows stopping you with a CRC error, try Western Digital's "Data
Lifeguard". It's a windows program that's designed to copy files from
your old drive to your new one and it works with non-WD drives. The
nice thing about it is that it doesn't stop if there's an error. It's
great for a drive that has a few bad files among thousands of good
ones.
Andy Cuffe

On Fri, 20 Jul 2007 11:07:56 -0700, Andy Cuffe
wrote:

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 00:02:02 +0100, Eeyore
wrote:

Try IBM's drive fitness test.

I forgot to mention that IBM is now Hitachi Global Storage (hgst.com).
Andy Cuffe

"clifto" wrote in message
news
Eeyore wrote:
Spurious Response wrote:

Eeyore wrote:
Spurious Response wrote:

Jeez! 300GB UDMA drives are $59 now for the high end.#

Made by whom ?

Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor...

All of which are brands history has noted for premature failure.

There's only one brand of HDD I learned to trust and that was Quantum.

Never tried one after their eighties problems with severe sticktion.
Loved their fix, too; make the motors pull harder to break the heads
loose.


They were alright for the most part, I had a few fail but most lasted pretty
well and were quiet but slow.

These days Seagate is the only consumer grade drive with a decent warranty
so it's all I buy when possible. I've also had good luck with Western
Digital though they put out a few turds several years ago.