DescentBB

any good disk checking and repairing tools out there or is Win 7 Pro good enough?



NOTE: I need a quick answer as this is a time critical repair i am doing



also, can i take ownership of a drive to access and enable tools on it? the drive is a laptop SATA 500GB with Win 7 Home Premium 64-bit


im running Win7 Pro 64-bit

chkdsk /f is generally sufficient... (Or chkdsk /r if you need a surface scan.)

Taking ownership of a bootable drive/partition should work, but could pose some access problems later. I'd generally avoid doing it unless it is absolutely necessary.

time critical? as in, you need to get the data transferred before it goes belly up?

If it's that much of a priority, get diskgenius and roadkil's raw copy. DiskGenius will rebuild any lost partitions/files and raw copy will do a 1:1 clone.

Also, if you need to clone a disk, you can get a linux boot cd and then do

dd if=[input hard drive i.e. /dev/sdb] of=[output hard drive i.e. /dev/sdc]

It will do a raw copy of your entire input drive to the output drive. Note that it's literally a raw copy of the entire drive, so all of your partition data, etc of the output drive will be gone. You can do it partition-wise by appending a number to the end of the device i.e. "if=/dev/sdb1 of=/dev/sdc1" will copy the first partition of the source drive to the first partition of the target drive.

If you use dd: 1. Make sure you get your drives and partitions right. It will do what you tell it to, including writing the data where you said, not where you meant.
2. Make sure that your destination drive/partition is either the same size as or bigger than the source.

If you have over-written your partition data (like I did), I'd suggest using DD to clone the original to a "working copy" to avoid making any changes to the original drive, then use testdisk to try to recover your partition information.

sfdisk is a linux command to check partitions. sfdisk -V /dev/sda1 will check the partition table on the first partition of the first disk.

(I'll pretty much always give you the linux version of the answer... which you may or may not want)

Does SpinRite work on W7?