[NLRS] OT: Hard Drive recovery?

[Doug Reed]

I've had a few bad drives over the years, and quite a few of them have 
been caused by Windows corrupting a drive during long write operations. 
Most of those problems come down to a glitch causing the master boot 
record or the main directory to be over-written. If the drive is 
accessed by Windows again, it comes up as a blank drive, if at all..... 
It could be I caused some of the problems by shutting off power before 
the last delayed write had occurred, but I don't know...... But I am 
very wary of turning off the computer and back on again in less than 15 
seconds.....

I've had a few failures due to hard drive failure, either the "stiction" 
problem mentioned by Jerry, or other types of start-up problems such as 
Scott mentioned. A few times I've tried the cold or hot drive options to 
see if it might help the problem. Results indeterminate.

I've also tried a program called Spinrite for fixing weak sector 
problems on hard drives that don't want to boot. Spinrite is a 
commercial program (www.grc.com) written in assembly language that does 
similar to the program Jerry wrote. Spinrite has both "repair" and 
"maintenance" modes. Repair mode does a sector scan and retries any bad 
sectors until they read correctly, then writes it back. It can take 
hours to read a bad sector and it also starts to do a statistical repair 
by looking for the bits that are changing. Maintenance mode reads every 
sector then writes it back to freshen the disk surface. I've used the 
Spinrite program to freshen a couple laptop drives and on a couple 
desktop machines. I didn't always notice an improvement so I can only 
say the program does something but only works on a sub-set of possible 
hard drive problems. It obviously can't fix physical hard drive 
problems. It also can't solve Windows write problems such as I had before.

Another option to keep in mind along with moving the bad boot drive to 
D: to extract files. If you move a Windows NTFS drive to a secondary 
position, Windows will still use the file access permissions based on 
file owner. This isn't a bad problem if you are the only user of the 
computer, but if you are trying to extract files belonging to someone 
other than the original owner, the file permissions will prevent your 
access. You can get around this issue if you use a bootable LINUX disk 
to mount and read the NTFS files. I recently used Mint Linux to copy 
files from an NTFS drive to burn a DVD for backup when the owner wasn't 
available. There are any number of LINUX bootable CD or DVD disks that 
can provide this function. I've also had LINUX read files on more than 
one drive that Windows 2000/XP couldn't read.....

73, Doug Reed, N0NAS.