Evening all.
Over the last couple of days I've been helping someone out with a Dell laptop running Vista. Basically his Vista installation was borked - nothing worked. Network adapters had gone AWOL, and most system tools (eg Device Manager) wouldn't launch. I don't know if he's picked up any viruses or malware as his McAfee antivirus wouldn't run either. I decided that a clean install from the built-in recovery partition was the easiest option. Prior to doing this we copied all his photos, videos, etc. onto his external USB drive. All seemed to go well.
Next day, reinstalled from the recovery partition, deleted all the preinstalled crapware, spent a few hours running Windows Update until everything was bang up-to-date, and then did a MalwareBytes scan to be sure. One clean Vista install.
Then - plugged in the USB drive. Windows Explorer crashed. Rebooted, and tried again. No joy. Tried plugging it into my Mac, and it appears that it's one of these 'helpful' drives with a partition with the maker's crappy backup software before the data partition. The crapware partition mounted, but I couldn't get the data partition to mount, either with DIsk Utility or through the command line with diskutil.
Back to the PC - I booted into Safe Mode with command prompt. When booted I plugged in the drive and used Diskpart to verify that the drive showed up and discover its drive letter. Then fired up CHKDSK to try and fix it. After 3 hours it had found shedloads of errors, had got to about 32% completion, but had been stuck there for at least half an hour and seemed to have given up, so I've left it for the night.
So, any recommendations for what to try next. A bit of Googling lead me to
this post on Lifehacker so I'm going to try some of those in the morning. But any further ideas would be welcome!
