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In search of ... Disk Doctor equivalent & image analyzer/verifier ...

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barney:
Folk,

I'm trying to find a couple of things:

* A reasonably recent equivalent to the old Norton Disk Doctor - you know, the one before Symantec hosed the Norton Utilities
* Something to check a disk image and verify its - validity?  wholeness? - anyway, verify that it is functional
A recent effort on another's machine convinced me to get off my ass and do something I've been putting off for a couple-two-t'ree years, i.e., reorganize this beast I call a server.  I has to HDs, a 1T and a 250G.  The 1T disk has a couple of bootable partitions, and the 250G a couple more.  What I wanted to do was to move the Win7 partition over to the 250G disk, then move or install - prolly install - a Linux distro on the other half of the 250G.  Then wipe the 1T drive and use it to serve files & local Web stuff.

Been backing up with Paragon v9, so it seemed simple ... just restore one of those images to the 250G.  Do any of you remember the early MS DOS days?  From v2.1 (where I started with DOS) there was a backup program ... it apparently worked ... but 'twas v3.x before they got the restore to work.  I had a serious case of deja vu ... none of the Paragon images would restore ... they kept complaining of cross-linked files - after, of course, running the job to completion :o.

So I decided to install Acronis True Image 2011, get the job done.  Yeah, right  :tellme:!.  Acronis couldn't even finish creating the image before choking!

OK, CloneZilla Live to the rescue, right :huh:?  CloneZilla did - I discovered later - transfer the files.  It did not transfer the MBR, nor did it install a Grub equivalent ... it too complained of errors, but they were different - and many.  After it finished, I rebooted the machine, got an MS message to the effect that I was hosed and should use the original CD/DVD.  I did that, clicked the Repair link, and voila, I had two bootable Win7 partitions.

So now I'm trying to find something that will let me examine HDs for errors, and something that can, somehow, verify that a disk image is good - if that's even extant.  I've looked for the Disk Doctor replacement for several years, now, but nothing found quite measured up :huh:.

And I don't know where to start looking for an image verification tool - 3rd party, that is, cause I've already seen the the built in tools are not reliable.

So, once more, I'm standing here, hat in hand, feet shuffling, asking for help .

JavaJones:
Something that can check and possibly repair a disk's "integrity" better (and less destructively) than chkdsk would be very welcome!

- Oshyan

f0dder:
chkdsk is for repairing a partition - and I don't see an alternative that would do a better job at that task.

If you have a seriously screwed up partition, you don't want to repair it - you want to salvage it's contents to a separate location.

barney:
Well ... yeah ... but ...  :o

Chkdsk, run weekly, produced a few fragments over time - which, by the way, Win7 makes extremely difficult to remove - but it never gives me the reporting, especially the visual cues, that Disk Doctor did.  

Tried several different defrag tools - currently checking Defraggler - and none of them gave me any negative feedback on HDs.  

There are some S.M.A.R.T. tools that kinda/sorta help tell what's going on - at least the ones I've tried over the years - but that information tends to be esoteric, and varies by manufacturer, sometimes by drive, to the point that it's damned near useless.

Then, there's still the matter of validating a newly created drive/partition image.

As mentioned initially, the images from the tools I had - fairly well respected tools, I'm told - all failed because of I/O errors of one sort or another.  But, there was no way to identify the error cause, thus no way to address ways and means of recovery.

That's the conundrum ... I'm left distrusting the tools currently available to me  :'(.

[Addendum:  how to discern a seriously screwed up partition
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f0dder:
You do not want to run a defragmenting tool on a volume you suspect has errors - that's about as helpful as trying to cure a mosquite bite by putting a shotgun to your face, after pouring gasoline all over yourself and setting it on fire.

S.M.A.R.T tools can only comment on the data returned from the harddrive about it's self-test data, which is all mechanical and has nothing to do with filesystem health.

Fairly screwed up partition? If explorer.exe hangs when you try to browse the drive is one sign. But there can be other types of corruption that doesn't really show any symptoms. I'm always pretty surprised when I see corrupted NTFS partitions, since it's pretty resilient to damage... but if you pull the power plug (or force a shutdown, or get a BSOD, or...) in the middle of doing disk I/O, nasty things can happen.

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