Utilities

UPDATE (2010-05-23) – Frank van der Horst added some nice “eye candy” to this script. For each Service Tag in Computers.txt, the script will display a small Internet Explorer window with a progress bar. Thanks, Frank!

Do you or your company use Dell laptops, desktop and server computers? If asked, could you provide the current warranty information for those computers in a report? Sherry Kissinger at MyITForum.com posted a way for SMS (Microsoft System Management Server) administrators to get Dell warranty information from individual computers.

We modified the script to accept a text file (Computers.txt) of Dell Service Tag numbers (one per line) as input, then output the warranty information for each Service Tag to an Excel spreadsheet. It’s a quick way to provide this warranty information on demand.

The script works by looping through however many Service Tag numbers are in Computers.txt, using VBScript’s Msxml2.XMLHTTP object to request the information from Dell’s website, then “screen-scraping” the information for that Service Tag and populating the Excel spreadsheet with that information.

Here’s the script. Change the file extension from .txt to .vbs in order to run it. This script requires that Excel 2007 be installed. Create Computers.txt in the same folder as the VBScript file. When you run the script, the Excel spreadsheet will be created in the same location as the script.

Do you find this script useful? How can it be improved? Let us know in your comment.

SpinRite 6.0 from Gibson Research Corporation (GRC) is not new (released in 2004) nor is it free (USD$89), but it can fix hard disks (or even floppy disks!) that appear to be beyond recovery. Depending on the condition of the drive, SpinRite could recover files that could otherwise cost thousands of dollars if you were to hire a professional data recovery firm to do the job.

It works by interacting directly with the magnetic media, fixing problems that occur as a result of normal use. You boot your computer from a SpinRite CD or floppy disk, then follow the menu prompts to perform maintenance or data recovery.

Why Would I Use It for Myself?
SpinRite is a good preventive maintenance tool for your hard drives, basically any drive except the newer solid-state drives. GRC recommends running SpinRite every 2 to 3 months. If it detects any bad sectors on a drive, it marks those sectors so that the operating system will not use those areas of the hard drive. This can keep your drive healthy, and for Windows XP users, can minimize the possibility of a “Blue Screen of Death” (or for Vista users, the blacK Screen of Death).

How Can I Use It To Help Others?
We know you back up your own data regularly (you do, right?) but when you get a call from your not-so-computer-savvy friend telling you their computer won’t boot, the data-recovery SpinRite could save the day. If a hard drive suffers serious trauma (such as being dropped), the possibility of recovering the drive is low. But, if the computer does not boot because of one or more bad sectors, SpinRite could have your friend’s computer back up and running in hours.

A Personal Note
A dear friend of ours had a Toshiba laptop that worked fine–until it refused to boot. The local computer technicians gave her the bad news: the hard drive was dead. Our friend was sad that she had lost hundreds of digital photos of fond memories of her travels, and her engagement party. She bought a desktop computer, but kept the laptop drive in a drawer for more than a year. When she told us what had happened, we asked to borrow her hard drive. First, we plugged the drive into an external USB case and tried to access it by plugging it in to another computer. The drive made some really bad noises, and we couldn’t access it at all. This drive had some serious problems!

Next, we put the drive in a laptop, booted into SpinRite, and within 3 hours, SpinRite had repaired 8 bad sectors. We rebooted the laptop (without SpinRite), and it booted into Windows! It was still making bad noises, so we quickly copied off the “Documents and Settings” folders (which included all of the digital photos). The copying process went well at first, but when it reached 97%, the “time left” climbed from 5 minutes to more than 3 hours. Eventually, we saw a message telling us the drive could not be read. Maybe the drive has officially died, but it survived long enough to copy off the important files.

We burned the files that we copied to DVDs and look forward to surprising our friend with some long-lost memories.

Takeaway: SpinRite 6.0 is a utility that anyone can use to maintain their hard drives, and has proven itself many times as a data recovery tool.

It’s rare that we recommend software that actually costs money, but if it can recover business-critical data (or priceless memories, as in our friend’s case), $89 dollars can be well worth it. Consider adding SpinRite 6.0 to your computer rescue kit.