Quote Originally Posted by jjmac
What tools did you use, do you think they would be of help to the OP ?

Did you manage to trace the cause. ?
I'm not quite sure who "the OP" is. I ended up using several non-free comercial tools. I expect if Howitzer17 has them he will have used them by now. In my case the problem seems to hve been a spot in the beginning of the notebook drive that had gone "soft", not corrupted data, but data that was hard to read. The sector or sectors have now been recovered and rewritten and the system now seems fine. I have no reason to believe this is the same thing that has happened to Howitzer17.