How do I fix a cyclic redundancy check error when I try to copy a file?

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Just wondering Leo, don't you think it is more advisable to just replace the drive, is total failure not eminant.? when it starts to spit out crc errors. My neighbor brought me a laptop that would not boot, I installed a new operating system onit and it was fine untill I started installing programs and got crc errors. Check disk reveiled a bad block chkdsk /r found dozens of orphaned files,is this not the pretence of doom for this drive? And lastly what article at the top of this page are you refering to that I should read or this post will be ignored, I clicked on "Read the article at the top of this Page" but fail to see the relevance, with all due respect. I gave them a two year old drive from one of my machines and in 3 weeks it failed on them. They must have dropped it or the dog knocked it off the table, so why not tell people that it could be the end of the line for their drive and casper it to a new drive and remain worry free for a few years.
Later
Chuck

The article at the top of the page is the article you're commenting on. People regularly post comments when it's clear that they haven't even bothered to read the article, hence my admonition that they do so.

As for advising them to discard a drive - it's a tough call. The fact is that a "rash of CRC errors" need not mean that the drive is about to fail completely. It could, of course, but it's also not guaranteed. Very often running a tool like SpinRite will both recover the data (something giving up will not do), and refresh the media such that the bad areas are either repaired (magnetic errors) or avoided (physical errors). Data recovery is, after all, an important consideration. With drives being as cheap as they are these days, it's hard not to argue for replacement if recovery isn't an issue, but even then it's not always a simple call.

25-Oct-2009

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