Checkdisk blues ...

[spectrum48k]

Disaster usually hits when you are on vacation  

I was out enjoying the Greek seas, when I got the call that an old PC in my office "had problems", but they were being taken care of by a "technician". Naively I did not ask further, wishfully thinking it would all go away before my return (got back today, as that plan backfired, obviously!)

Nobody bothered to clone the disk (80 GB disk), get backups or bother with such mundane tasks; they went in to solve the problem by mounting the HD to another PC (Windows XP would not start on the old PC) and running - what else? - checkdisk with the fix option enabled (obviously another very easy decision to make).

Checkdisk has been running since Aug 04, they tell me the first unredable sector was somewhere at 16000 -16100 and it's now (Sat 08) at 22229 and still going...

Should I just pull the plug on checkdisk and try with some tools that might actually work?  
What do you think?

Thank you for your time,
George

[Tom]

Pull the plug asap. Letting chkdsk grind through the disk in this matter will only make things worse. The scenario for this is standard: clone the disk as is, and work on the clone. You can use DiskPatch to clone and should probably then use iRecover to lift files from what's been cloned.
As we state elsewhere (everywhere) on our webpages and in our documentation: chkdsk is NEVER the way to go when in a recovery scenario. Unfortunately that's not common knowledge, not even with "tech" people...

[spectrum48k]

Thanks a lot for your extremely fast reply.

The patient however died, so it's just another valuable lesson for the future right now. I stopped Scandisk, but a few minutes later, while trying to restart the system, the HDD in question wouldn't show up anywhere (no drive letter) and the BIOS can't see it either. I was too late, it would seem (to its credit, the disk lasted 4 days of grinding)...

I tried to get a log using Diskpatch, but Diskpatch does not list the problematic HDD either.
  

[Tom]

Too bad, but as you said, lesson learned.