Hard disk repair

[josephj]

My Windows partition on my notebook is going south and I'm having difficulty backing it up in Linux.
I need a (hopefully free) utility to clean up/repair the disk errors so I can get a clean backup before I replace the drive.

I have Avanquest System Suite 10 (used to be Vcom).  Its disk fix utility says nothing is wrong, but its scan utility fails on a disk error, so it's not being very helpful.

I used to have Norton Utilities, but I don't have a recent version.

Any suggestions?

TIA

Joe

[Mr.Victor]

Joe,

Try to rebuild/repair your partition with the following free Partition Manager utility:

http://download.cnet.com/Easeus-Partition-Manager-Home-Edition/3000-2248_4-10863346.html?tag=mncol;pop

[josephj]

Sorry if this is double post.  My original reply seems to have disappeared.

Thanks.  I'll look into that.

I have a super nice partition editor called gparted on a bootable cdrom.  I would encourage anyone to try it.  You don't need to know anything about Linux to use it.

Eventually, I was reminded of my old buddy chkdsk -r.  That did the trick.

Someone also suggested another old friend, spinrite which I haven't used for so many years that I had forgotten it.

Joe