Subject: [CTC] Recovering access to a hard drive Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 16:14:24 -0500 From: Pierre Clark To: Stephen Ronan CC: gclabaugh@mott.org, riders@topica.com, americaconnects@ctcnet.org A couple more suggestions, Steve. There are many different kinds of hard drives out there but for 90% of the IDE drives - most common drives on 486, Pentium and up systems - that are out there that we've encountered, when the drive doesn't boot, there is probably a virus on the drive that will destroy or block the Master Boot Record on the drive. Viruses are much more common on these drives, we've found, that people think, especially at CTCs and public access sites. Booting from a floppy won't work to bypass the virus on the drive because if the virus is in memory, every time you stick in a floppy you infect that floppy with the virus. So what we usually do is use Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus software. Dr. Solomon's is the only AV software we've found with a special boot disk that bypasses DOS, doesn't use it to boot, and therefore doesn't load the virus from memory. Once you boot with the special disk, Dr. Solomon's will check all the HDs on the system, tell you what virus is infecting the drive, and will remove and repair the Master Boot Record. Also, every drive has two copies of the File Allocation Table, so if one is destroyed, the other can be recovered with something like Norton Utilities or Nuts and Bolts (now McAfee Office). Ontrack is good because they made the disk partitioning software for most of the early IDE drives and they specialize in data recovery, but most of the time when we've had boot problems in the past or a drive stops booting it has been because of a boot virus on the HD. Dr. Solomon's is about $80.00 and I think they have a website. Just thought I would mention this as something else to check out. - Pierre Stephen Ronan wrote: >The material below is taken from an exchange on the email list >for folks who provide technology-related assistance to >nonprofits. It's reposted with Gavin Clabaugh's permission. The >oldest message is first, so that you can read right down this >message from top to bottom. - Steve Ronan > > >>>>One of my customers had the unfortunate experience of losing >>>>access to a hard drive with vital data. The drive will not boot [...] ------------------------------------------------ * America Connects Consortium national CTC discussion list * * To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@ctcnet.org with * the message: unsubscribe americaconnects youremailaddresshere * * Any questions? Please write CTCNet staff at info@ctcnet.org. * * Archives: http://www.ctcnet.org/americaconnects/