Paid-for hard drive diagnostic software

If you’re willing to spend a bit of money on your diagnostic software then the first place to go is the Gibson Research Corporation’s website (tinyurl.com/yc5dLz4). When you first arrive you might find yourself rather questionable of the aesthetics – the site looks like something out of Geocities in the 1990s – but don’t let this put you off. This is the home of SpinRite, a legendary disk monitoring and data recovery app that plenty of users swear by.

The software, now in its sixth generation, has five levels of operation ranging from a simple scan to restoring sectors, and has been known to often get supposedly dead drives running again. It’s not cheap, but then quality software rarely is. At the moment you can buy SpinRite V6 for around £70 at tinyurl.com/y9adc76.