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Tools, tools and more tools

When I ran across this mention on Download Squad of TestDisk, an open source, cross-platform disk recovery tool, I just knew this was a tool that Friends in Tech readers needed to know about. I can’t say that I’ve tried it out, but it certainly sounds like it could be a very useful tool. Has anyone had any experience with it?

In that same vein, I later stumbled upon the largest list of Sys Admin tools I’ve seen in one place before.  Definitely something worth bookmarking for future reference.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 3:49 pm and is filed under IT, Mike McBride. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  • Acid Reign

    …..I’m a totally uneducated computer tinkerer, so my opinion probably won’t mean much, but… I credit a cocktail of testdisk (v. 6.6) and Spinrite 6 for saving a laptop hard drive.

    …..We experienced a catastrophic failure of the C: drive of a problematic Acer laptop (Toshiba 40 gig drive) last January. Chkdisk wouldn’t touch it. I ran Spinrite, and it took nearly 24 hours to complete, and found a LOT of unrecoverable sectors. More troubling, though, was that Spinrite claimed that the drive was written in the RAW format. Uh-oh, boot sector/FAT trouble!

    …..After spinrite was done, the BIOS, Chkdisk, even a boot disk created via Partition Magic 8 could not recognize that there was even a drive present. Spinrite would still recognize a RAW drive still there, so I figured the drive was still spinning up. Rather than force my wife to go without a laptop for days or weeks while I fiddled with the thing in my spare time, I bought her a new Thinkpad and loaded backups on it. The Thinkpad has been marvelous, and totally trouble free, BTW.

    …..And so, from time to time, I did play with the dead Acer. Another Spinrite full diagnostic did not reveal new flaws, so maybe the heads were working right again. I came across Testdisk, on a recommendation from Lifehacker.com, and gave it a shot. I’m not a big command-line guy, but the /? switch of testdisk had enough good info for me to give it a shot.

    …..I prepared testdisk on a USB drive, and booted the Acer off a BartPE CD. I ran testdisk from the command prompt, and was able to create a new boot sector. Then I booted the computer off an old Win98SE CD, and ran Fdisk, creating a new primary DOS partition, taking up the whole disk. Then, CD Win98, and Format C: /s. After no errors turned up, I removed the Win98 CD, and rebooted. It was a sweet sight when that C:> prompt flashed back at me from the screen!

    ……After I had a formatted, bootable c: drive, running the little Norton-Ghost-based Acer recovery CDs was no problem. After a few minutes, I had WinXP Pro SP1 back on the drive and successfully booted. Then, Partition Magic to go to NTFS, lots of Windows Update, reinstalling, etc. We’ve used the Acer as an “extra” household PC since, and had no problems. It has not seen the HEAVY 10 hour a day use it endured prior to the disaster, though.

    …..As far as I am concerned, Testdisk fixed a problem, for free, that I would have otherwise had to buy a new harddrive to take care of.

  • Acid Reign

    …..I’m a totally uneducated computer tinkerer, so my opinion probably won’t mean much, but… I credit a cocktail of testdisk (v. 6.6) and Spinrite 6 for saving a laptop hard drive.

    …..We experienced a catastrophic failure of the C: drive of a problematic Acer laptop (Toshiba 40 gig drive) last January. Chkdisk wouldn’t touch it. I ran Spinrite, and it took nearly 24 hours to complete, and found a LOT of unrecoverable sectors. More troubling, though, was that Spinrite claimed that the drive was written in the RAW format. Uh-oh, boot sector/FAT trouble!

    …..After spinrite was done, the BIOS, Chkdisk, even a boot disk created via Partition Magic 8 could not recognize that there was even a drive present. Spinrite would still recognize a RAW drive still there, so I figured the drive was still spinning up. Rather than force my wife to go without a laptop for days or weeks while I fiddled with the thing in my spare time, I bought her a new Thinkpad and loaded backups on it. The Thinkpad has been marvelous, and totally trouble free, BTW.

    …..And so, from time to time, I did play with the dead Acer. Another Spinrite full diagnostic did not reveal new flaws, so maybe the heads were working right again. I came across Testdisk, on a recommendation from Lifehacker.com, and gave it a shot. I’m not a big command-line guy, but the /? switch of testdisk had enough good info for me to give it a shot.

    …..I prepared testdisk on a USB drive, and booted the Acer off a BartPE CD. I ran testdisk from the command prompt, and was able to create a new boot sector. Then I booted the computer off an old Win98SE CD, and ran Fdisk, creating a new primary DOS partition, taking up the whole disk. Then, CD Win98, and Format C: /s. After no errors turned up, I removed the Win98 CD, and rebooted. It was a sweet sight when that C:\> prompt flashed back at me from the screen!

    ……After I had a formatted, bootable c:\ drive, running the little Norton-Ghost-based Acer recovery CDs was no problem. After a few minutes, I had WinXP Pro SP1 back on the drive and successfully booted. Then, Partition Magic to go to NTFS, lots of Windows Update, reinstalling, etc. We’ve used the Acer as an “extra” household PC since, and had no problems. It has not seen the HEAVY 10 hour a day use it endured prior to the disaster, though.

    …..As far as I am concerned, Testdisk fixed a problem, for free, that I would have otherwise had to buy a new harddrive to take care of.

  • http://jw.fi/ Jan Wikholm

    Thanks for the link to the awesome repository of tools.

  • http://jw.fi/ Jan Wikholm

    Thanks for the link to the awesome repository of tools.