HDD 'died' cyclic redundancy error

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. >

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 (

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

Graham

Do NOT use Spinrite.

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

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 news: snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com:

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!

it

Experience. I can't count the times I've used it and been sorely disappointed with it's results. It also taxes an already failing drive sometimes to the point of complete failure. At one time long ago it worked slightly better with MFM and RLL drives to refresh the media but I can't remember a time when I've used it and when it was done, all was fine and dandy. Best to use Get Data Back for FAT and quickly recover the data that you can recover and be done with it. If you need a copy (for evaluation purposes only) I can get it to you. It's small enough to fit on a floppy IIRC.

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

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

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

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com

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

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com

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.

What was that 3 platter turd that caused them to give out replacements? Maybe it wasn't 3 platter but I think it was a 1.6 gig????

The problem with that idea is that you can't get to that lower level any more. That door closed with the introduction of IDE / ATA drives many years ago.

One more thing that they belatedly cloned from DRDos / NovellDOS.

Actually that was/is a DOS "TSR". A separate program provided by others.

Yes, it had better functionality and speed in a very similar memory and disk footprints.

You can get that. Do some re-search.

DOSKEY was supplied by Microsoft.