Are there any good utilities for doing i/o directly to disks that are not mounted, possibly not properly formatted? I recently had a friend's computer die and when I initially tried to access the files on the primary hared drive, it reported back as not being formatted (which I knew was not the case). In another setting I was able to mount and read the disk, but I was wondering what we do when that can't be done - what utility/ies do we use to recover disks that won't mount? By "good utilities" I mean those that are relatively easy to use in order to read and possibly write a raw disk sector. dd doesn't really qualify as "easy to use" but it would suffice in a pinch. Thanks. Mark