Spinrite Problems

[myxomoP]

I have what, by all outward appearances, is a faulty TB external hard drive. CRC errors in uTorrent seem to point to this, but I've also read that such errors can be the cause of bad cables as well. Nevertheless, torrents which were in progress are now dead with CRC errors and my hard drive and all 900+GB of info and media on it are at risk. uTorrent's forums listed Spinrite as *the* utility to check/repair faulty hard drives, which I have been trying for days to use with no luck yet.

The one-click option in the Spinrite exe to make an ISO file produces a 1.44 MB image which I then burned to disc with Nero. Before I was able to burn the image to disc (I have intermittend optical drive problems as well), I tried using a flash drive as the boot device, but would only get the message:

"No bootable partition found in table".

When I was finally able to burn a boot disk, the first several attempts to boot from CD/DVD failed. Recently, however, it's started working, but still no luck on Spinrite. When booting from CD, some Intel Boot Agent with a 1997-2005 copyright starts running, *not* Spinrite, then lists some mac address and GUID, and at the end of that line is DHCP with the DOS equivalent of an hourglass spinning (\|/-\|/-), before listing two errors:

"PXE-E53: No Boot Filename Received"

and

"PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel Boot Agent"

then bypasses the disc and loads Windows.

I've read on similar threads that disabling network activity in the BIOS settings is one option, which I'm about to try, in addition to just unplugging the network cable from the computer. My guess is that the boot process I'm seeing with this mysterious Intel Boot Agent is a different boot option than booting from CD/DVD, such as a boot from network option, and the BIOS isn't even reading the CD to begin with.

Any and all help is appreciated.

UPDATE: The BIOS will not even boot from CD. The Intel Boot Agent was the computer's attempt to boot from LAN, which was next in the boot order beneath CD/DVD. The disc is almost instantly bypassed.

[moogly]

You can try HDD Regenerator 1.51 to fix bad sectors. It's a very useful software. Maybe try it on a small part of your HD.

http://www.gold-software.com/download7605.html