Ontrack Data Advisor

From a boot floppy disk, analyze your computer

Ontrack is a major player in data recovery. Their Data Advisor is a diagnostic program that analyzes both your hard disk and system RAM. It runs from a boot floppy disk. There is both a free and paid version of the program.

Version 5.00 Gripes

June 23, 2004. I ran version 5 on Ontrack Data Advisor on three computers today and experienced problems with it on each one. After the second failure, I verified that the floppy disk was OK and it was.

Even before running the first test, I had a gripe. The free version of Data Advisor installs a program (the Ontrack crisis center) on your computer that you are not told about until after it has finished creating the boot floppy disk. This seems to be just an ad for their paid services. Its not clear how to un-install it - the Ontrack Crisis Center does not show up in the Add/Remove Programs applet in the Control Panel.

As part of its hard disk diagnosis, Data Advisor can analyze FAT file structures. However, it does not support NTFS and it was not clear to me if it supports FAT32 or not.

Dell PowerEdge

The program booted fine and started to run. It got through the first hard disk test and in the middle of the second one Data Advisor crashed. All I could read was "fatal error" as much of the message was covered up by the user interface. Also, the message disappeared after only a few seconds. I did however also see a message that it was updating the floppy disk. It didn't - all the files on the floppy disk were from March 13, 2001.

Perhaps if the hard disk was broken in some way, a crash in the diagnostic program would not be too surprising. This computer was fine, however. Not only were the no problems beforehand with the machine, but just to insure the problem was with Data Advisor, I ran a full hard disk test using the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test program (which also runs from a boot floppy disk) and it found no problems.

IBM R40 Thinkpad

The warning message displayed about being licensed to use the software for 30 days. I clicked on the OK button. The outline of the user interface appeared but nothing else. The computer froze. Ctl-Alt-Delete was ignored. The on/off switch was ignored. I had to take the battery out of the computer to turn if off. To insure this was not a fluke, I rebooted the machine with no problem, turned it off, and tried Data Advisor again. Same error. The mouse worked fine though (see below).

Note: Data Advisor was running from an external USB floppy disk drive, but other boot floppy disks have worked just fine using this same hardware combination.

IBM NetVista

The mouse did not work. The mouse pointer ran all over the screen as if on its own. I had to run the program using the keyboard.

It reported a few partitions as "unknown". These were not partitions at all, they were unallocated space between partitions.

It reported that the file structure test failed. I suspect this is not true and probably comes from the message below (a guess on my part as the reason for the failed test is not made clear at all).

It reported a few partitions as having an invalid extended partition table. I doubt this is true as Partition Magic version 8 finds no errors at all.

FYI

You can download the free version of Ontrack Data Advisor from www.ontrack.com/dataadvisor/ (click on Demo).

Use of the floppy disk is licensed for only 30 days.

I did not run the RAM diagnostics nor the complete surface scan.

The paid version of Data Advisor is $20.

Created: June 23, 2004

Page last updated: June 23, 2004