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PowerQuest,
the company that brought you PartitionMagic and DriveCopy, has now brought
us Lost and Found, a utility to reclaim directories and files from dead
and dying hard drives.
I tested
two hard drives on a 233-MHz AMD K6 computer with 64 MB of RAM and two
hard disks to see how well Lost & Found performed. One hard disk was
a Maxtor MXT-540A, an ancient 500 MB IDE drive with many major defects
shown by Norton Disk Doctor and SpinRite, and it wasn't even bootable
due to the extent of damage. The other was a Conner CFS425A, another
ancient 425 MB IDE drive with major defects, but it was bootable. I
changed both to slave drives by changing their jumpers and installed
them on the system.
Installation
Phase
First, I have a few words here regarding the installation of this program.
Lost & Found shows the same kind of extreme paranoia by PowerQuest that
they've shown on their other products. That is, Lost and Found comes
to the user on two diskettes, and after installation, you will run the
program from the first diskette. No diskette, no program. They also
make this statement in their manual:
"Each
copy of Lost & Found will only run on one system. The program automatically
registers itself to the system when you run it the first time. It will
not run on another system. If you need to recover a disk from a second
system, you must purchase another copy of Lost & Found."
So,
what's this mean? Does the program "register" itself to the CPU type?
Does it "register" itself to the operating system serial number? Does
it "register" itself to the hard drive's serial number, or it's physical
configuration? If so, can you upgrade your hard drive such as by using
their PartitionMagic, DriveCopy, or DriveImage to copy the partition?
Can you resize the hard drive or change its file structure using a product
like PartitionMagic? What if your bootable partition crashes, or if
the hard drive itself crashes? What if you install to the hard drive,
but boot from a Zip drive, CD-ROM drive, or a floppy drive? In any of
these conditions, will Lost & Found run? No luck if you want PowerQuest's
Web site or manual to tell you.
And
what about the "original diskette" you need to run the program? After
all, there's probably not a program left since about 1987 that requires
a diskette to run, but here comes PowerQuest, reinstituting one of the
lousiest file protection schemes for us to suffer through now. There
is some small consolation in that the manual also says:
"It
is a good idea to make a backup copy of Lost & Found on a separate diskette.
Then if your original Lost & Found diskette becomes corrupted, you can
usually copy the files from the backup diskette back to the original
Lost & Found diskette to correct the problem."
I find
myself very suspicious of words like "usually," having found by experience
that this often means "in a pig's eye" far more than "always." They
also say you can copy these files from their Web site, if you have your
serial number, or you can order replacement diskettes from them. This
is some further consolation, except when you consider Muller's Law:
Your worst crash is always on Sunday afternoon just after all the computer
stores close and when the boss wants that "special project" to be turned
in first thing Monday morning. I hate to think about not being able
to recover these files using my paid-for, safely-hidden "original diskette"
of Lost & Found, due to it not reading right, or due to my computer
system that I upgraded in some manner now being deemed unacceptable.
If this ever happens to someone needing it critically--the only reason
to run this program other than reviewing it--I expect they'll feel far
more like a victim of PowerQuest than a loyal supporter.
PowerQuest
has further muddied the waters by modifying their registration process,
per their Web page:
"In
response to valuable feedback from our customers, PowerQuest Corp. has
eliminated the licensing enforcement restrictions on our data recovery
product, Lost & Found. While the licensing agreement terms remain the
same (for use on one computer), Lost & Found version 1.01 removes the
registration process, which previously physically prevented users from
installing the software on additional machines. We believe our customers
will be responsible in their use of Lost & Found and further enforcement
of the licensing agreement is unnecessary.
"For
customers who own Lost & Found 1.0, an upgrade patch will be available
for download on the PowerQuest Web site at www.powerquest.com by the
beginning of April. This patch will disable the product's registration
process.
"We
apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and hope this change
reflects PowerQuest's commitment to providing our customers powerful,
easy-to-use technology solutions."
Where's
this leave us? The problems with having to boot from an "original diskette"
remain, and any installation on another machine is a violation of the
licensing, although not physically impossible. This is still a bad situation
in my mind. A better solution would be to have something like WordPerfect
used to have eons ago: a license that allowed multiple computers, but
only one operating the software at any given time.
The
Lost & Found manual also lists another product for multiple systems.
It is called Search and Rescue, but there's no information on it at
their Web site. The Lost & Found manual says it has "additional features
for data recovery," but PowerQuest must be contacted directly to find
out about it.
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Lost
& Found runs on DOS 5.0 or higher and in a text-based interface, but
not the graphical interface of Windows 95 or 98. However, the box and
documentation expressly states that Lost & Found supports only FAT16
and FAT32 file systems, and only LBA (Logical Block Addressing) and
CHS (Cylinder-Head-Sector) hard drive addressing. The program does check
for SCSI drives as well as IDE drives. The Lost & Found box and the
documentation do not mention Windows NT, the FAT32B file system (used
on hard drives more than 8.4 GB in size under Windows 98 and probably
Windows 2000), the NTFS file system (with Windows NT), HPFS (OS/2),
or now-obsolete MFM or ESDI hard drives. I find these omissions strange
because all of these file systems or hard drive types are still in use
or are coming into use.
Initialization
Phase
When I started Lost & Found on the Maxtor 540 hard disk, I hadn't
bothered to set the computer's BIOS to identify it correctly to see
if the program would still work. It found the correct parameters flawlessly.
Likewise, on the Conner 425 hard disk, which I had set up in the BIOS;
it also recognized all the correct parameters. However, although it
also recognized my 11 GB IDE master hard drive, it reported it as "corrupted."
I think this was due to its having a System Commander multi-boot MBR
(Master Boot Record) setup, or maybe due to its having the active partition
set up using the newer Windows 98 FAT32B configuration. Obviously this
could have been a problem if the master hard drive contained the files
I had "lost" and needed "found."
After
identifying the hard drives, Lost & Found then prompts for the drive
you want checked and where you want the data restored. You have a choice
of diskettes or another hard drive.
Analysis
Phase
When the analysis starts, it's in "real time." Even on the old, slow
hard drives I was testing, those sectors that were good tested at a
speed of nearly 3,000 sectors per second. On those sectors that were
bad made the speed drop as low as 1 sector per second. On the Maxtor
drive, which contains major media surface problems, this meant an estimated
"time until completion" which was variously reported as being about
10 minutes to as long as 28 days!
Luckily,
there's also a setting that determines how many times an attempt is
made to access a sector. I reset this retry setting to 5, so when it
hit this kind of error, it counted to the limit, and then brought up
a red message that said "Drive read error (10H), retry count 5, ECC
error, unable to correct," and then continued on. By the time it completed
the Lost & Found check on the Maxtor drive in about ten minutes, it
had checked 530,060 sectors, found 30 total read errors, read 1, didn't
read 29. It found 581 directories, and 10,525 files including directories
that had been deleted and files that had been deleted. It gave a choice
to select them all, unselect them all, or individually select them,
both as entire directories, and as the files within them.
Recovery
Phase The "presentation" of the directories and files was also nicely
done. Those directories and files that were without any obvious problem
were presented in the color green, those with some problems were in
yellow, and those with major problems were in red. Those that were deleted
were identified by their first letter being the lower-case Greek letter
sigma, and the rest of the name being correct in the same manner as
various undelete utilities and Symantec's DiskEdit utility in the Norton
Utilities.
Needed
Fixes
There are two minor places where the program could be improved--this being Version
1.0--was that a lot of directories were identified in red as "NONAME,"
and that the entire directory tree isn't visible as a choice. So I found
a lot of "NONAME" directories with perfectly valid files inside them,
but no way to know this unless I highlighted them, pressed Enter, and
looked at what was found. This proves to be tedious with dozens of "NONAME"
directories. With directories that had correct names such as "Windows,"
I didn't have that problem because that was a valid clue as to their
contents.
The
Ultimate Test: Passed
I also did one last check. I ran the Maxtor 540 through Norton's DiskEdit,
deleted the partition table, and did my best to delete all the file
entries in both FAT tables (except that DiskEdit kept stopping me!).
After this, trying to run DIR at the DOS prompt gave me a failure code
saying the hard disk could not be read. So I ran Lost & Found. At first,
Lost & Found didn't see the hard disk at all, then went a little farther
into the program, and found all the parameters, and then ran for several
minutes and reconstructed all the files. And I do mean all files, including
ones I knew were deleted years ago. Some of the messages were strange
like one saying it estimated 81 days until completion; but, again, the
total run time finally came out at only 10 to 15 minutes.
Conclusion
Until PowerQuest came on the scene, Symantec (e.g., Norton Utilities),
Gibson Research (Steve Gibson's SpinRite and Trouble In Paradise), and
Helix/McAfee/Network Associates (Nuts and Bolts) were the leaders in
this field. Old stand-bys from Paul Mace (Mace Utilities), Central Point
(PC Tools), and Quarterdeck are now gone or folded into the products
offered by the remaining companies. But, by whatever measure, with this
product, and with heavy-duty sluggers like PartitionMagic, and its junior
products like DriveCopy and DriveImage, PowerQuest is now a force to
be reckoned with in the field of software utilities.
If
you have a hard drive that you've got to get the data off of, and nothing
else works because the problems are so extreme, I firmly recommend Lost
& Found. I've been building and repairing microcomputers for nearly
20 years, and this is a very formidable and worthwhile product. I will
gladly put it in my collection of utilities, but I will not be happy
having to run it only on one computer. That's an unreasonable limitation
in a world where Moore's law is now being met in 9 months, and where
1000 GB (i.e., 1 terabyte) hard drives might be available by the end
of the year.
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