Besides PartitionMagic, what's good in the way of advanced HDD tools?

[yukichigai]

I've taken a little of my work home with me and am trying to reformat a busted laptop drive. Windows Disk Manager tells me there's a bad sector it can't read, and Partition Magic indicates the file allocation tables are corrupted. Now I'd be willing to let it go at that... if I could actually do some kind of drive scan on it to see how bad the damn thing is. But neither Windows nor Partition Magic will access the drive at all. Windows is unable to mount it, and Partition Magic straight crashes when you try to start it with the drive plugged in. (I'm using a 2.5" USB drive enclosure) I know there has to be something out there a little better than can let me do some further tests, but I have no clue what it is. Anybody have recommendations?

 

[Megatomic]

What brand of drive is it? Does the manufacturer offer any tools for it? Maxtor, WD, and Seagate all have low level tools to fix stuff like this. You can get the utilites from the respective site.

 

[Calin]

Lost&Found might help (it did helped me more than once)