Advanced NTFS Hard Drive Utilities

[demonic]

I have taken a hard drive out of a machine and put it another and windows wants to chkdsk it, but im not going to let it as chkdsk is a basic utility and will probably delete the whole hard disk.

Can anyone recommend freeware or commerical utilities to analyse a hard disk?

To then recommend rebuilding the partition table or at least get it readable by windows? I dont want to format it lol, as it has alot of info there.

Cheers

 

[SugarCoat]

its a slave drive and you just want windows to recognize it?

 

[demonic]

it is a slave drive, it works in the bios and windows says its there.. but it needs chkdsk to run.

i did let it start and it all it did was delete files. chkdsk is alot of crap. i need something like disk internals ntfs recovery or better.

im no noob. i know how to install a HD. Except this HD has decided to fart and most likely its partition table is screwed. I need an app to look at it a different way and tell me what needs to be fixed.

I cant afford to format it.

So please, in the nicest possible way. Dont give me advice on troubleshooting it hardware wise. This isnt what this thread is about.

Please give me advice on software troubleshooting an HD.

Thanks

 

[SugarCoat]

checkdisk shouldnt be deleting hard data, it only scans the drives and reports the health, nothing more, unless you do a checkdisk recovery. Sometimes it reports errors or moves clusters but thats not going to wipe out the drive either.


You can run it in windows via a cmd promt by opening one and simply typing chkdsk x:
where x is the drive letter. All thats going to do is output the drives health and maybe make a recommendation.


The only reason i asked what you were doing was because you werent exactly making much sense in your OP. Doing a basic chkdsk wont delete anything or ask you to format let alone doing anything like that without asking first, or anything of that nature. Simply reports the health.

 

[demonic]

i agree with you, but it was deleting clusters. i had to reboot it to stop.

All I have done, is literally take it from one pc and put it in another. Well 2 now and they have both said the same thing. Im really peeved off. It obviously didnt like the journey.

Well im going to try a few utilities, if anyone can offer advice. Would be grateful.

Windows recognises it as a disk, but its currently unaccessable.....

 

[SugarCoat]

was it spitting out stuff like this?


Deleting an index entry with Id 263 from index $SII of file 9.
Deleting an index entry with Id 264 from index $SII of file 9.
Deleting an index entry with Id 265 from index $SII of file 9.
Deleting an index entry with Id 266 from index $SII of file 9.
Deleting an index entry with Id 265 from index $SDH of file 9.



or was it doing this
Windows replaced bad clusters in file x

First isnt going to harm your files and is caused by a security verification failure.

the second isnt going to cause any data loss either. Its windows swapping out spare good clusters, which every NTFS formatted HDD has, when it detects bad ones.

Best HDD utilities for scanning and reporting of health are usually supplied by the manufacturer of the drive itself so i'd try there first if you're totally paranoid about chkdsk, though i can pretty much guarantee you its not going to attack your HDD and wipe it out. I've never heard of such a thing ever. In rare occurrences doing something like the checkdisk recovery may cause a problem with a few files, but thats a very, very, rare occurrence.

Its possible the drives health is going downhill, but again chkdsk or replacing bad clusters wont make it happen any faster.

 

[demonic]

To be honest, cant remember what it was doing. Too many issues at the moment.

I will just have to grin and bear it and try some utilities i have downloaded.

The drive was fine, why did I have to pull it out of the working machine, sigh.

 

[Sobek]

Uh...skip chkdsk and just disable it?

http://ctrinity.wordpress.com/2006/09/30/disable-chkdsk-at-startup/

 

[demonic]

Just to wrap this one up.

The problem was never the hard drive. Even though one machine I plugged it into said Invalid IDE device and on another the mauf. software (maxtor) said the drive was failing.

The issue was that both machines were completely old and crap and didnt support drives over 120gb or so.

Once I had connected it to an equivilent machine that I had pulled it out from. Windows didnt even say a pep. Accessed the drive perfectly, whereas with the other 2 "legacy" machines, windows would complain saying it needed to be chkdsk and couldnt access the drive, once the drive letter was clicked.

The exercise was good though, as I have alot more hard disk utilities than when I started lol.

 

[satein]

Just to wrap this one up.

The problem was never the hard drive. Even though one machine I plugged it into said Invalid IDE device and on another the mauf. software (maxtor) said the drive was failing.

The issue was that both machines were completely old and crap and didnt support drives over 120gb or so.

Once I had connected it to an equivilent machine that I had pulled it out from. Windows didnt even say a pep. Accessed the drive perfectly, whereas with the other 2 "legacy" machines, windows would complain saying it needed to be chkdsk and couldnt access the drive, once the drive letter was clicked.

The exercise was good though, as I have alot more hard disk utilities than when I started lol.

Just becareful to put a new hard drive into a "legacy" machine!! Sometime, theoretically, it might be no wrong (backward compatible) but sometime is not in reality. The old controller can mass up your patition while doing "chkdsk" thing as it want to fix it... And when you pull it out, your data are gone and you don't really know of it. It did happen to me long time ago while trying to connect a big drive to backup my "legacy" machine but end up massed up my own big drive and took a few days to find out how to get it back... luckily at that time I can do it, it is not always guaranteed.