Disk Drive Test Utility Tool links

In addition, I also heartily recommend the Ultimate Boot CD:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

As it contains most (EDIT: ALL!) of those as well as tons of other HD & recovery tools, all bootable from one CD-R.

Edit: Han, I suggest linking from your FAQ thread to this one for discussion

-brendan

PS - Along the same lines, but working more toward data-related and not hardware-related disaster recovery, there's also Ultimate Boot CD for Windows

http://www.ubcd4win.com/

However, ubcd4win takes a lot of work to create as it cannot be distributed whole due to copyright: it requires copying files from your XP/2003 setup CDs. I put one together with some additional tools, so now I have ubcd4win bootable off of a flash stick on my keychain... :)

bhoar,

Where were you when I was getting my small list together! :)

Thanks for posting this info, good stuff.

Han Solo wrote:
Thanks for posting this info, good stuff.

No problem. Hope y'all find it useful in development/testing as well.

-brendan

ReadyNAS staggered spin up is disabled by default, so that you
may also need to disable certain Maxtor dirve's staggered spin
up feature. Thanks Toaster for reporting

http://www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?t=29207

http://www.maxtor.com/_files/maxtor/en_us/documentation/white_papers_technical/staggerd-spin-detection-pin11.pdf

bhoar wrote:
In addition, I also heartily recommend the Ultimate Boot CD: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

FYI, the ultimate boot cd has been updated to v3.4.

-brendan

If you have a badly performing or suspect disk, here's an interesting tool for analyzing it.

If you go here, and indicate you will follow the download rules:
http://files.hddguru.com/

...you can then go here and download HDDScan 2.6

http://files.hddguru.com/index.php?&dir ... ft/HDDScan

One of the neat things is that you can use the tool to get your SMART stats, then run a full scan and both look at the results (it keeps track of bad blocks and evey blocks that took a while to read) plus you can then grab the the smart results at the end of the run as well and compare them against your initial notes. The statistics gathered on "read delays" are interesting as well - you might see patterns there that the drive isn't yet reporting via SMART!

You will, of course, need a SATA controller on your machine to attach the drive to.

The file area also has a lot of drive-recovery related tools as well.

-brendan

And here's one that *might* be useful to pros or perhaps Infrant internally, for RAID recovery:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

It seems primarily oriented around partition table issues, though, so it may have limited usefulness.

-brendan

Hi bhoar,

Is there a particular utility you used to make your USB Key bootable?

b-a-t-m-a-n wrote:
Hi bhoar, Is there a particular utility you used to make your USB Key bootable?

Yeah, argh, it's been a while. Let me search...

The file you need is from HP and is called: sp27213.exe

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find it on the HP site, so you will need to google or search HP for it.

This site says it might have it but I'm not sure they have permission to post it: http://www.bay-wolf.com/usbmemstick.htm


-brendan

Thanks, I'll give it a shot. Another question: Is your Diagnostic USB Key usable only on computers with USB ports that are only on an OS / SP Level that you specified in your configuration of the USB Key?