Disk integrity

An interesting sidelight on hard disk integrity: an excellent source of info on the subject is Gibson Research (www.grc.com), run by Steve Gibson. And the king of all disk-checking programs is his Spinrite program. But -- Although Steve is no fan of Microsoft, he inexplicably wrote Spinrite so it only checks Windows partitions. For Windows partitions it does a marvelous job, verifying the low-level formatting and rewriting tracks so as to refresh them. I wrote to him once suggesting that Spinrite really ought to operate on drives, not partitions, but never heard back. I guess that even the good guys sometimes get things wrong. Paul Abrahams