XP Drive maitenance/recovery options

July 6, 2006 10:57 AM

Windows XP Drive maintenance, recovery and restore tools. Looking for what's in your toolboxes.

I'm trying to get together (to pass on) a decent toolkit of those things to keep XP systems top notch (I know this in detail for OSX).

So what regular drive maintenance do you do (and how often?)

What happens if there's something wrong (directory, etc.) - what tools do you use?

And short of sending the drive off to a recovery group, what do you use to recover the information?

I'm also interested in any SCSI/Raid tools as well.

Yes, while I know about linux options, please limit this to XP. Thanks.

posted by filmgeek to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Ontrack Easy Recovery has saved my butt more times than I can name...
posted by Cosine at 11:13 AM on July 6, 2006

SpinRite is awesome for low-level drive maintenance and attempted recovery when all else fails. Heck, I just ran it last night.

I have Norton SystemWorks, so I use Speed Disk and Disk Doctor to fix filesystem errors and to optimize.

For recovering deleted files and partitions, I've used the GetDataBack tools from Runtime Software with great success.

Another nice little tool to keep XP running fast is PageDefrag. It defragments the Windows registry and swap files on boot.
posted by chuma at 11:38 AM on July 6, 2006 [1 favorite]

For when the shit has hit the fan, I use Bart's PE, (easily built if you have an XP CD), combined with UBCD. It mightn't give you many options for restoring a truly hosed installation, but it's saved many of the folks I've helped from losing all their data.
posted by punilux at 1:17 PM on July 6, 2006