I'm far too new to MS to be of use on the Forum yet, but I can offer a good tip for file recovery.

Try Active-Undelete, which can be found here: http://www.active-undelete.com/

Two years ago, I had a failure of my office PC wherein not only were files trashed, but all the partitions of the hard disk had been fragged as well - complete disaster! After taking it to two "experts" who accomplished exactly nothing (they couldn't even begin to explore the drive without intact partitions), I starting doing some online research and found the above product.

I attached the failed hard drive to a system with a working environment as drive D, then installed ActiveUndelete (AU) on the good system and let it have a go at the failed drive. It was amazing; AU took about an hour to examine the drive, then found 99.99% of *everything*, including the various partitions, folders etc. I used it to copy everything over to a new drive (preserving the folder layouts) and got back all but about 10 files out of over 300,000. This product saved my a$$ at a critical time, and I highly recommend it. Pretty cheap too; about US$40. Other than as a satisfied and relieved user, I have no connection to the product or company. And FYI, I use Acronis TrueImage for my daily full-system backups; also a good application. I keep AU, Acronis and SpinRite on emergency-recovery CDs and floppies now.

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When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed. - Ayn Rand

Jim, does SpinRite work well on modern/large SATA drives?
And what about USB external drives - have you tried SpinRite on any?


jose '-)

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MetaStockTools.com

Jim, does SpinRite work well on modern/large SATA drives?
And what about USB external drives - have you tried SpinRite on any?

I don't have SATA drives, but according to Steve Gibson's FAQ http://www.grc.com/sr/faq.htm the answer is yes. I've used it to examine (haven't needed to repair) USB drives, and that works.

I've used SpinRite since version 2 a hundred years ago, with early PC compatibles; it's remarkable what Gibson's gang has developed in this product - his knowledge of the low-level hardware of drives and controllers is comprehensive and SpinRite can really dig into them. He's always preferred to do his final coding in assembler for speed and control, and it shows; his products are incredibly tiny by today's standards of code bloat. Used to run into him at Comdex years ago and he's the real deal - an ubergeek.

As long as I'm hyping his stuff, if you go to his site http://www.grc.com/default.htm and scroll down, check out ShieldsUp in the Hot Spots section - it's a free interactive test of your firewall and system port security, and will nondestructively bang hard trying to get in with a report on what holes it found. I've had to set up some fairly complex VNC and camera remote access for my business, and used ShieldsUp to batter my port-forwarding and firewall setup afterwards to make sure I didn't leave any hacker-holes open by mistake.

GRC.com is highly recommended for education about system security, disk-drive reliability and many other topics, even if you have no interest in his products.

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When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed. - Ayn Rand