Bill:

In my opinion, SpinRite 6.0, available from Gibson Research Corporation:

www.grc.com

is the absolute gold standard in hard drive maintenance and recovery. I 
believe it still goes for $80. The big downside: it operates by booting from 
a version of FreeDOS which is loaded into the computer's random access 
memory, and hence this disk maintenance utility is totally inaccessible to 
screen readers. If you have access to sighted assistance (which access needs 
to be for as much as a day or so depending on the task you choose and the 
size of the hard drive involved), than I would definitely recommend this 
program most highly. With the amount of RAM memory available on most 
computers today, I'm sure there would be a way to load both a DOS 
screen-reader and the SpinRite program into RAM and execute both from same, 
thereby creating an accessible version of this program, but you would still 
need to either load and operate the computer's sound card driver from RAM or 
use an external synthesizer. I love to see someone tackle this project; its 
way beyond my capabilities!

John

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Sun Sounds of Arizona" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, January 30, 2009 12:53 PM
Subject: [VICUG-L] utilities for testing hard drive or other components


Can anyone on this list please suggest your favorite, preferably low cost,
utilities for testing and repairing hard drives.  I know Norton Utilities is
pretty good, but they are pretty expensive, and not very accessible.  Does
anyone have a better choice?

Please reply to the list as I am asking for others.

Bill


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