John Higginbotham wrote: I've used Spinrite since it first came out, and have found it to be the best software for maintaining and sometimes fixing hard drives. I was called in a number of years ago to try and recover the data from a HD that was in the process of crashing and losing everything. Since it was handy, I tried the Norton NDD (?) software to recover the data that was unreadable. Of the four lost files, it destroyed the first three. By that time, I gave up and invoked Spinrite. It recoverd the data effortlessly (although it did take a bit of time :) .) Recently, a friend brought over his HD to see what was going on with it. I ran ScanDisk thinking it would be fairly safe. No such luck, and again, a bunch of data got destroyed. Sometime after that, I acquired the current version of Spinrite and tried it on the drive. It instantly complained that the drive and the drive settings differed along with a few other tips. Turned out that LBA somehow got turned off in the BIOS and thus corrupted the disk. I truely hate the brain-damaged program ScanDisk as nothing more than a Trojan Horse! Microsoft should have known better than to put out something like that. I have *never* had a problem with Spinrite although that probably includes only a few hundred drives I have worked on.