Author: Ricardo Gibert
Date: 10:17:49 04/22/05
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On April 22, 2005 at 00:12:57, Jorge Pichard wrote: >I started having problems with my 60GB hardrive and I'm looking for the best >hardrive maintenance program in the market. > >http://grc.com/spinrite.htm In the old days, before the advent of IDE drives, spinrite was a fabulous product. I used to make extra money by doing a lot of PC hardware buying/selling/repair/etc. I had great confidence in the product back then. It was one of--the--tools to get. It seemed it would--always--succeed if success was possible. When IDE drives made the seen, it took good awhile for spinrite to come up with version to tackle IDE drives, but then I had already moved on to other means of support. It would be many years before I would revisit the product. When I finally did, I found it was good but not great as it once was. I purchased it again a couple of years ago based on my past experience, but got disappointed when I tried to use it to fix a harddrive problem. I tried scandisk first. When it reached the bad block on the HD, it made a few weird noises, then it hung. GRRR! I was very patient giving it the benefit of the doubt by waiting over 30 minutes for it to get past the bad block, but no dice. Next up was--spinrite--and the story was the same. Then I went out and bought Norton Utilities and its attempt failed the same way too! I was--not--happy. My last plan was to learn how to use the Norton sector editor to do the repair manually. I knew where the bad block was, because just before all the programs all hung, the last block number they all worked on was displayed. Before doing this, however, I decided to take a break until the next day. In the mean time, on another computer, I was surfing the internet looking for some piece of software that had nothing to do with the problem and stumbled on a utility that appeared to be worth a try. What piqued my interest was that it was put out by IBM/Hitachi and I had an IBM Drive. It was a free download, so what the heck. I followed the directions and launched my attempt. When it finally reached the bad spot on the HD, My computer made a few weird noises as before, but then, instead of hanging, it marked it bad and continued to chug along! Hurray! But then it hit a 2nd bad spot, but it too got marked bad! Hurray! The program completed normally with HD problem solved! Lesson: Use the Utilities put out by the HD manufacturer for your HD. Here is a link to the one I used. It might also work for other drives, but I don't know for sure. In any case you will find at the same site some other similar utilities put out by other HD makers: http://tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287 If you don't find it there, try the website for your HD manufacturer. As for the latest version of spinrite, I can't tell you whether it has re-achieved the level of excellence it once had. With free utilities put out by the HD makers, who know their own drives best, I would give them your first try.
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