Seb bought his external hard drive over, so we could swap films non-commerical, freely given away videos. He also wanted to run a couple of tests on it, as there had recently been some data loss. Whether it was caused by proximity to some magnets, a hard knock to the disk, or just the drive’s age, he couldn’t tell, but Microsoft’s tool (chkdsk) had actually ended up doing more harm than good, so we decided to try out a few live CDs to test what could be recovered. As the drive is in an external USB enclosure, we had to find a PC that recognised such devices during the POST checks, to ensure the disk diagnosis software (DOS-based) could see the drive without Windows being involved. Unfortunately, the test will take around 170 hours to complete, but as you can effectively pause the software, and continue on from the same spot on a different machine, we thought we’d leave it running a while, before he takes it home, and attempts the test whilst connecting directly via a P-ATA lead, and hope that the USB interface is the main reason for the slowness right now.
Dec 12 2008
Data Recovery
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