Michael said:
I used CDBurner to burn ISO file ubcd51b1.iso.
This seemed to go smoothly creating a bootable CD for my WinXP SP3
computer.
The Nero SmartStart suggested in UBCD's Tutorial at the following link did
not work.
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/nero6.html
It displayed an error message that it was not compatible with my operating
system. Hmmm. I was unable to find a free Nero tool that was comparable.
The bootable CD has some diagnostics, but I had hoped for something
different. For example, I thought I might be able to use this to recover
saved music and pictures from my hard drive in the event my computer ever
failed to boot. No problem as this was all an experiment to see what UBCD
provided.
I already have a bootable CD that came with my Dell computer It runs (i.e.,
boots) if I press <F12> during boot. It may be too early to rule out ever
using my newly created UBCD bootable CD. But at this point my first option
would probably be to use the Dell CD if my laptop won't boot.
This procedure is not for the faint of heart and I totally agree with this
comment by Paul.
********************
"Some people, if I mention a free software, they run off and find some "hell
hole" to download from, and then complain they got a "registry cleaner"
instead
Even when you do find the source website, it can be hard to find
the proper download link, due to so many adverts being present.)"
*********************
I had to do a lot of cleanup (i.e., uninstalls of unnecessary software)
after I was done. My Avast! anti-virus software even displayed a warning
about using one of these undesirable downloads.
Thank you everyone for your excellent comments.
In terms of rescue software as such, there is Photorec. This could be
a scavenger, looking for sectors containing the "signature portions"
of the file. Tools like this may not work well, if the disk is fragmented,
as the idea is, the file system is damaged enough, there is nothing to
tie the fragments together. Photorec can be run from Windows or Linux.
For a test, I used this to find a deleted file (as deleted files aren't
overwritten until the file system needs the space).
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/File_Formats_Recovered_By_PhotoRec
The other tool you can look for, is Drive Rescue. The person who wrote this
originally, was giving it away for free. And then one day, sold the source
to a commercial company, and shut down his site. This link is to a copy
of the tool. I can also find the original site, in archive.org . The site
seems to be unchanged, all the way back to 2003.
http://www.pricelesswarehome.org/WoundedMoon/win32/driverescue19d.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20070101070056/http://www.woundedmoon.org/win32/driverescue19d.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20030303125843/http://woundedmoon.org/win32/driverescue19d.html
One person who had an NTFS disk problem, he tried that out, and got all his
files back. You connect a second disk, and I think that tool tries to find
the files and writes them to your spare disk. You generally don't want to
try writing the recovered files to the same disk you are scavenging if possible.
Tools like CHKDSK, attempt to "repair in place", and that is a dangerous
option. If you have severe damage and know it, you want to make a forensic
copy of the disk first, before letting CHKDSK run. There is a two pass,
sector by sector backup method for damaged disks you can do from Linux,
using "ddrescue". It's for cases, where the disk is badly damaged enough,
that each sector copy is taking 15 seconds or so, and it would take
infinite time to complete. This does a quick first pass, and keeps a log
of "missing" sectors. If the disk has a "bad patch", this is intended to
get the good sectors first. And then, the second pass tries to fill in the
blanks. Sectors which fail to read, I think they're replaced by all-zeros.
The destination disk here, should be same size or larger than the original.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Damaged_Hard_Disk
# first, grab most of the error-free areas in a hurry:
./ddrescue -n /dev/old_disk /dev/new_disk rescued.log
# then try to recover as much of the dicy areas as possible:
./ddrescue -r 1 /dev/old_disk /dev/new_disk rescued.log
If you want to run tools like CHKDSK from a DVD, you can download
a Windows 7 installation DVD, and it has recovery options which
include a "command prompt" environment. A Windows 7 machine can
make a 200MB CD with that purpose, and one site was providing
links to an image of such a CD. The download in that case was
via Torrent. Now, the interesting thing is, the web sites
that Microsoft uses for selling Windows 7 from, have "open"
download links, and you can get the entire DVD image from
such a site. You burn that to a DVD, and then that can be used
as your rescue disk. You could run CHKDSK from there, for
example.
This site shows some links. Digital River is a company that sells
software for download, and is an authorized dealer. I got a copy of
24208 and 24209 from the links shown here, in case I need to do
a "repair install" of my Windows 7 laptop. Slipstreaming doesn't
work as well for Windows 7, as for WinXP, so having one of these discs,
for the day the laptop dies, is why I got 24209. And 24209 can be booted
and you can run the Command Prompt from there.
http://www.mostiwant.com/blog/downl...rated-dvd-iso-official-direct-download-links/
There is also a recovery console image for WinXP floating around.
I think I may have run that in a VM, and it gives you a command
prompt, and it would give you capabilities like "fixboot", "fixmbr",
and chkdsk. The original site is now gone, but you can find this
on the archive. There should be an iso inside the zip.
http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/Tools/bootdiscs/xp_rec_con.zip
4,677,680 bytes
MD5SUM = 230f7800105440e8433006a033186f6f
As for the "Hell Hole" comment, a few people I help, are quite insistent
on doing a random search when some software is mentioned, and clicking
every link in sight. Maybe it's the notion of "well, I'm running an AV
software, so nothing can harm me". I use Siteadvisor on occasion, as
a way of warning about certain sites. You enter the domain, and in
some cases, they actually test downloads coming from the site, for
malware. Most sites get a "pass" via this thing, so again, only
the most egregious sources of malware will get flagged. Some are
given a pass, when they need more analysis.
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/allflac.com
HTH,
Paul
