[BBLISA] windows disk diagnostics

[Eric Smith]

Thanks for the quick response....
I should include more info.
It was not my boot drive, so the system comes up fine.  I just checked
the other drives and they seem fine (in case the issue was case-heat
related.)
The troublesome drive is an NTFS formatted 500G hard disk (used only for data.)
The drive was ordered in June of last year - it's a Segate ST3500630AS
so I'm sure it supports SMART.  I'll go find a SMART utility and see
what it says (on all the drives.)

I don't think I have another disk big enough to fit its entire
contents, so I can't just move it and reformat it.  Although I could
always buy another 500G drive, swap it into my external enclosure and
do it.  They are not *that* expensive (and I could use it as a second
backup afterwards.)  But I do have two other 250G backups in USB cases
so I've got everything backed from before... the beginning of 2006 on
other drives.

I'll look into that utility, thanks.

Eric

On Feb 2, 2008 6:58 PM, Scott Ehrlich <scott at mit.edu> wrote:
>
>
> Does your hardware support SMART error reporting?  If so, see if your
> hardware claims that the hard drive is going bad.   Otherwise, maybe one
> of the Live Linux distros has smartd and can tell you the state of the
> drive?
>
> If the drive is good, can you siphon the data you care about from it and
> place the data on another drive, then reformat it?
>
> If the drive is bad, I've had excellent success with getdataback for NTFS
> from runtime.org.  If your H drive's filesystem is FAT, they have the same
> product for another cost.  Just have enough space on a good hard drive to
> store the recovered files.
>
> Or, if the drive is FAT, and you can boot into it, and it has enough free
> space, try converting it to NTFS (convert drive_letter: /fs:ntfs) and
> after a reboot, it will/should convert the filesystem over.
>
> Scott
>