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Friday, February 6, 2009

"He came to me asking help and advice/And from here no one knows where he goes"

Okay, I need "help and advice," and I can't find my way back to the Three-Acre Wood.  But my question has nothing to do with a honey jar being stuck on my nose.  That, I've kinda gotten used to.  Anyway...

Failed hard drive.  2.5" SATA.  Spinrite wants to run on that drive for three weeks, estimated.

I have a Thermaltake BlacX external SATA enclosure, works with either USB or eSATA.  With USB, Spinrite doesn't have enough low-level access to be able to work on the drive.  My only current option is to put the old drive back in my good laptop (Dell Inspiron 1525) for three weeks, and be stuck using my old Toshiba 320CDT, which only runs Win98SE, and does that very slowly.

I could buy an eSATA card to put in my equally-aged desktop machine (currently collecting dust in the basement), perhaps, and plug the eSATA cable into the card.  I suspect that might give the desktop sufficient access for Spinrite to work on the drive in the BlacX, and I sure don't mind if my dusty Desktop is tied up for three weeks (or whatever) fixing the drive.  But I don't want to spend money on the eSATA card if it's not likely to work for the only purpose for which I'm liable to need it.

So, anybody know enough about SATA, eSATA, and Spinrite to be able to tell me the odds of the card-in-the-Desktop idea is liable to work?

Yes, I know, GRC has support newsgroups.  I've never had any luck posting questions to the GRC newsservers.  Something about their password setup I just ain't getting.

Thanks.

Griz


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