Best Hard Drive Utility? Repair/Maintenance?

[uptime]

I was wondering what everyone had in mind for a good HD utility?

I know some like SpinRite, and others say it is horrible and ruin's drives. I think I ruined a drive with it so I'd rather pass on using it.

I know of the Maxtor Utility and the Western Digital ones, anyone recommend anything else? Something to detect if the drives are going bad, help defrag, low level format back to zero's (I know the manufacturer utilities do the formatting well).

Anyone recommend anything?;)

[Tex]

nope. Stick with the utilities from the manufacturer to format and test a drive. Its all you need !

I like diskkeeper to defrag. Its a little better then the windows defragger.

Have you tried low level formating the drives that appear ruined? Thats your only hope.

Spinrite is evil. On the old RLL drives it sorta had a purpose but with modern IDE drives I would never recomend its use in any way or form unless you already thought the drive was trashed and just wanted one last shot before you through it in the trash.

Tex

[uptime]

The burned drives seem to be shot. If I hook it up to my machine it is not recognized in any way. Tried to set it as a slave and it held my machine from being booted.

Tried to put it in without any other drives and popped in a windows cd. Said some type of disk error, or was not even posted.

Tested with the utility and it doesn't show....I hear it spin up and everything, I think SpinRite ate it somehow....