Re: Need disk error checker for Windows XP

Joni Nevalainen wrote:
> Mike Easter wrote:
>
>> If you want to read some scary stuff about disk integrity, you should
>> read some of the 'educational' pages at Steve Gibson's SpinRite
>> sections.  SpinRite ain't free and it ain't very cheap.
>
> A bit more digging made me discover this article as well:
> http://www.grcsucks.com/spinrite.htm

If you are going to read John Navas, you should read Gibson's site and
the reviews and testimonials.  This is from a blog discussing Navas vs
Gibson

http://www.gadgetopia.com/post/838

D.R. | December 4, 2003 04:41 PM
// http://grcsucks.com/spinrite.htm

Most of this is refuted by reading the spinrite tech notes:

http://www.grc.com/files/technote.pdf

AND, John Navas produces a competing product ( Cable Modem/DSL Tuning
Guide) to Gibson's Shields Up. Interesting, eh? grcsucks didn't mention
this, that I could see.

Most of Navas' objections to spinrite are indeed about silly promotional
comments about spinrite. Big Deal, all ad copy contains some of this.
But the objections to the technical aspects fall short. It makes me
wonder if Navas has read the tech notes about spinrite.

I may be only a lowly electronics technician, but I do know a little bit
of BS-ing about a competitors product when I see it. I don't know about
shields up, or any of that stuff, but the technote regarding spinrite
seems righteous to me.  //


There are plenty of reviews of spinrite available at grc and elsewhere.
And testimonials.


http://www.kickstartnews.com/reviews/utilities/spinrite_5.html  SpinRite
v5.0 -- Reviewed by: Elizabeth Boston

// While it is running, SpinRite will read and re-write the entire
surface of the drive, reporting everything it finds. By doing this, it
is able to provide early warning of increasing numbers of regions that
are becoming troublesome for the drive. With this warning, you can back
up your data and remove the drive from service before a complete
catastrophe results in loss of any data. If SpinRite is not used until
after a crash, it skillfully picks up all the pieces, recovers your
data, and puts everything back together again.

Since I repair computers and see a fair number of failing hard drives, I
held on to the program long enough to test a few drives that came in. On
several of those drives, SpinRite assured me that the problem was not
with the drive itself. One drive could not be seen by the computer at
all due to hardware failure. And on one drive (that another program had
diagnosed as hopeless), SpinRite not only recovered the data, but when I
ran it a second time using operating level 5, it fixed the bad sectors
and returned them to use. //


-- 
Mike Easter
kibitzer, not SC admin