On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 03:49:05 -0400, "Michael Kennedy" put finger to keyboard and composed:
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.
- Franc Zabkar
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go to grc.com and buy SpinRite - well worth the money ($19 ish???). It has various different recover methods and will sample damaged sectors hundreds of times (if necessary) and use statistical analysis to rebuild damaged blocks. It can take days on a deep dive, but if the data is that valuable...
You should still replace the drive once it is recovered so clone the disk onto a new one but this has saved my arse and that of lots of my customers many times. People know they should backup stuff but most don't. Spinrite has only been
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.
Most of the systems that I use/put together use RAID5, 10 or at the very least 1. So a single failure isn't an issue so long as you deal with it quick enough and not just sit on it like one customer. "Oh that red light has been on for months but it all seemed OK" Struth!
Maxtor comes with 3 year warranty so any that fail in a RAID setup would be replaced no probs and if they fail after the 3 years, who cares? prolly long overdue for bigger, better, faster drives anyway.
Eeyore wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com:
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].
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bz 73 de N5BZ k
please pardon my infinite ignorance, the set-of-things-I-do-not-know is an
infinite set.
bz+ser@ch100-5.chem.lsu.edu remove ch100-5 to avoid spam trap
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.
I run Kubuntu Edgy on an AMD Athalon 64 desktop and an Asus widescreen laptop (Intel Centrino). Edgy installed with no intervention on my part on the laptop. I had to manually switch the X window source on the AMD box to support the embedded NVidia graphics hardware's acceleration. Funny thing is that I had all kinds of trouble reinstalling XP on this AMD 64 because it's an E Machines made by Gateway and the proper chipset drivers were buried deep on the web site of the motherboard manufacturer (MSI).
Quantum was a good drive until Maxtor took the over I have a couple 4.7 gig Fireballs that are used in my Fostex D90 8 track digital audio recorder.. I don't rely on hard drive quality, I rely on redundancy. I have cloned drives sitting on the shelf for this desktop and my laptop. My data is stored on a network storage server with two drives, one hidden. The active drive backs up to the hidden every morning at 3 am.
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.
There's a commands.exe (in c:\HP\BIN) on this Vista 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
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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.
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Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
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Member of DAV #85.
Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
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