SpinRite Rocks!
No surprise to other people who have used it, but SpinRite is a great tool. From Gibson Research Corp. (http://grc.com) SpinRite is a hard disk maintenance and recover tool. Not cheap, but a great value.
So why did I need a hard disk maintenance and recovery tool? Well… another one thing leads to another. I want to upgrade to the current version of Quicken. But it requires more memory than my machine has/had. OK, so I go out to the store and buy a 2GB upgrade kit, and install it. While I’m in there, I blow out a lot of dust. And at some point while my back was turned, I heard something go “clunk”. Hmmmm…
So I put the box back together, plug everything in, and boot. Mirabile dictu, it boots clean, and the system shows 2GB of memory! And I turned my back to pick up something, and it crashed. On restart, it went to CHKDSK, and then froze at 92% of checking indexes. After half an hour, I said that’s enough, went to another machine (everyone has backup machines, right?) bought SpinRight, downloaded it, ran it and burned a boot CD. Back to the frozen mchine, use the power switch to cycle it, and get the disk into the drive.
SpinRite at level 2 (recover unrecoverable data) ran for about 3 hours, finding and repairing a block of sectors. The machine now boots, and runs noticeably faster with all the memory in it.
I’ll have to run SpinRite in maintenance mode every month or two, and think about replacing the hard disk. But it isn’t the urgent “gotta fix it right now” it might have been, thanks to SpinRite!
CAUTION: before you open your computer to do anything, get a backup! I did, and it relieved a lot of stress, knowing that all my data was on a USB drive if worse came to worst.