Eric, Spinrite is good to recover a drive where you have problems reading information from. What it does is read each physical sector, does an integrity check of that sector (it copies the sector to physical RAM) and if the sector checks out ok it puts the data back on that same sector. If the sector is determined to be 'bad' it puts the data in a different sector and updates the FAT to point to that new location. There are 4 Levels of integrity checking. It is recommended to use the 2nd Level for a quick scan and fix. Level 4 is the deepest and takes the longest.
The software uses FreeDOS to do a bootup and if that drive can be 'read', or 'seen' by Spinrite, you should be able to do an integrity check. If the sector that has the information needed to be seen by the volume is corrupt, you can use Spinrite to 'recover' that sector, or sectors, in questions. It will not repair the volume on the level for NT/W2K/W2K3 to be readable. It doesn't work that way. Also, you have to scan the entire drive, you don't have the option just to scan particular sectors. You could stop the scan after a few minutes, though, and pick up where you left off. Once a sector has been scanned, it moves on to the next sector, and only that sector is moved to RAM while the integrity check is being done. That means if you stop the scan, the current sector is left the way it is. Make sure that you read the manual, carefully. And understand, also, that this is a sector recovery utility, not a volume repair utility. I like using this as it is not dependent upon any OS. Utilities, like Acronis rely on the OS to be up and running. If you have any malware or spyware running in the background, you may inadvertantly corrupt you hard drive. Don't get me wrong, Acronis does make some good utilities, but I like utilities that don't rely on Windows to function, on an upper level. Spinrite operates on a lower level, and it doesn't care what format the drive has on it. The drive could be setup to be used on a UNIX system and Spinrite will still be able to scan it. The drive could be IDE, EIDE, SCSI , ESDI, MFM or RLL, and if Spinrite can see it you can scan it. Hope you can recover your drives. On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 11:00 AM, Joe Fox <[email protected]> wrote: > Eric, > > I would get a copy of Steve Gibson's SpinRite ( > http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm) and run it on each individual disk. > I've heard (have never had to use it myself) that it can find errors and > repair then allowing the software RAID to work. > > It's $89.00 US per copy IIRC. > > HTH > > Joe > > On 1/14/2009 4:33 PM, Eric Brouwer wrote: > >> Good afternoon, >> >> I lost a volume on one of my NT servers the other day, and I can not find >> a way to get it back. It is a non-fault tolerant striped set created >> through Windows NT. It is not a hardware RAID. The other array I can still >> access shows it's formatted as NTFS. The array giving me troubles shows as >> "unknown format". All disks are present and accounted for in Disk >> Administrator, and none of the drives have any problems listed. It looks >> like NT just lost the settings for this array. Of course, the data is not >> backed up. >> >> Can I get this array back? Any utilities I can run against the disks to >> find the configuration information? I'm currently downloading the NT >> Resource Kit to see if I can find anything on there that might help. >> >> Thanks, >> >> Eric Brouwer >> IT Manager >> www.forestpost.com >> [email protected] >> 248.855.4333 >> >> >> >> >> >> ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ >> ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ >> > > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ > ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
