Saturday, April 12, 2008

Norton Disk Doctor and Caught A Virus

The drive doesn't spin. Either the onboard controller is bad or the motor is bad (assuming you did try the drive in another machine). It's time to hit the net and local independent shops to see if you can locate another drive of the same make and model that's good. Since the drive is probably an older drive and no longer in distribution, your best bet is to find an identical used drive. If you know someone with the same make and model, you might be wise to try and persuade them to sell you their drive with an offer of providing them with a free upgraded drive. If you can locate an identical drive, start with the controller replacement ... this is the simplest and least invasive. If swapping the controller doesn't produce the desire result, you can tear into the drive and swap the motors. While you have both drive opened up to accomplish this, scrutinize the platters, heads and armatures. You might even hook the drive up and power it from a system with both drives attached. This way, you could see anything that deviates between the actions of both drives when they are initialized. Swapping patters is unlikely to produce any positive result. They are a balanced system like the tires on your car and I suspect that the balance will be different for each drive as will other variables.

5. There's always Ontrack Corp. who will attempt to recoup your info starting at $500 and going up from there. They don't fix and return the drive either.

If the info is all that important to you, I would seek some professional and experience technician in your locality who makes his living from servicing and building computer systems ... not just selling them. If you have had much experience salvaging information from bad hard drives, your likelihood of success is low. In the case of soft corruption, all utilities have their eccentricities. Often times, Norton Disk Doctor will go too far (if you let it). It's wise to just let those utilities small steps and then have a look at the drive and see if you can copy it off. Norton will go so far as to rename directories and files, and even delete them or break them up into fragments which are useless.

4. Caught A Virus??????

If you've let your guard down--or even if you haven't--it can be hard to tell if your PC is infected. Here's what to do if you suspect the worst.

Heard this one before? You must run antivirus software and keep it up to date or else your PC will get infected, you'll lose all your data, and you'll incur the wrath of every e-mail buddy you unknowingly infect because of your carelessness.

You know they're right. Yet for one reason or another, you're not running antivirus software, or you are but it's not up to date. Maybe you turned off your virus scanner because it conflicted with another program. Maybe you got tired of upgrading after you bought Norton Antivirus 2001, 2002, and 2003. Or maybe your annual subscription of virus definitions recently expired, and you've put off renewing.

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