Brian said:
Since others haven't mentioned it, CRC errors are indications that your hard
drive may be failing.
Slamming shut a network connection to a .pst stored on a mapped drive is
another cause for corruption of the .pst file and why Microsoft does not
support use of a .pst file across a network. Windows crashing so that the
file isn't gracefully closed is another cause, especially if not using NTFS
and instead using FAT.
SpinRite has restored to operational status many disks that otherwise
would have been thrown in the trash. I have no vested interest in
SpinRite. I've heard plenty of reports about it, though.
I had Spinrite several years ago. Excellent product for reviving a hard
disk. However, other than re-alignment, the repaired disk should be
considered flawed and temporary until you get a replacement. The cost of
getting Spinrite is usually outweighed by getting a new hard disk at a
cheaper cost; however, as you mention, you may not be able to retrieve your
data from the flawed disk. In the scenario where you work on many hosts
(computer shop, IT dept, test lab, etc), Spinrite should be part of your
recovery toolset. If I could find my old copy then I'd upgrade at lower
cost, but the initial cost to buy it new doesn't make sense versus just
buying a new hard disk for the same money (since you're probably going to
buy a new hard disk, anyway, even after using Spinrite to repair the failing
one).
Realignment or refresh would be the only 2 fixes from using Spinrite where I
would continue using the old hard disk. As I recall, there is a deeper
sector inspection available in Spinrite to catch the bad ones before the OS
detects a bad sector (because the OS permits up to 15 tries to read a sector
which slows access and means the sector is going bad).