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Monster Cables- The World should know!

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f0dder:
CWuestefeld: it's a desperate-last-measure thing, though. I've used it once in the past, and it did work (though what made it work might as easily be a slight bump to the drive or whatever)... after a while, the drive short-circuited because of condensated water though, and I guess I'm lucky it was only the drive the shorted :)

Another desperate thing I've done has been knocking the drive lightly with the heavy end of a screwdriver. The drive sounded like the read/write heads were getting stuck, and it didn't even show up on the BIOS POST (try to rescue that Mr. Gibson!). Knocking got the heads unstuck, and then I sat there watching the imaging/copy progress, tapping on the disk whenever the progress bar got stuck. Obviously, the drive was thrown into the litter afterwards.

I'm sorry for the people who fall for the SpinRite propaganda, but that really is what it is.

Lashiec:
CWuestefeld: it's a desperate-last-measure thing, though. I've used it once in the past, and it did work (though what made it work might as easily be a slight bump to the drive or whatever)... after a while, the drive short-circuited because of condensated water though, and I guess I'm lucky it was only the drive the shorted :)
-f0dder (March 25, 2008, 08:34 PM)
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Don't they recommend to put the HDD into one of those plastic bags with the zip lock used to freeze food to avoid things like that?

f0dder:
I dunno if that would help any - the drive is still getting cold (which is the point of putting it in the freezer), so when it heats up it will cause condensation. And some drives (*cough* maxtor *cough*) heat up pretty quickly, so it's a dangerous game to play.

Rover:
Hirudin: please don't bring spinrite into this, it's snake-oil :), and mr. Gibson only has buzzwords and "it's super secret advanced tech!" to say, nothing quantitative.
-f0dder (March 22, 2008, 01:27 PM)
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Slightly off Topic.  Just wanted to call BS on your snake-oil comment.  Spinerite actually does work in some cases.  I have used it to recover 1 or 2 drives.  See the article here:PC World Mag

Fortunately, SpinRite 6 is less ambiguous when it encounters a distressed drive. I put the app to work on four magnetically damaged floppy disks, and it lit up the screen with flashing graphics as it worked to recover my data. It saved three of the four.

SpinRite 6 is no substitute for regular backups. Still, having the software around for maintenance--and knowing it's there in an emergency--makes it worth the price.
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-Rover (March 25, 2008, 02:52 PM)
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heh.. no I didn't write the article.  Look, I never claimed Spinrite is the world's greatest software.   I am familiar with SMART and I know that new drives should be able to deal with things much better than my old ESDI & MFM drives did.  And I never suggested Spinrite in lieu of backups; that'd be freakin' nuts.

I'm just saying that it has saved a few "near death" drives that I know of and I seriously doubt it's total BS.  You may think $89 is too much for what it does (or doens't) do, but that's a different issue.

In a perfect world, we'd all near instant backups of all our data and a dead drive would be a trivial issue;  Replace drive, restore data, resume work.

mwb1100:
I am familiar with SMART and I know that new drives should be able to deal with things much better than my old ESDI & MFM drives did.-Rover (March 26, 2008, 10:03 AM)
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I think that this is one of the keys - SpinRite was originally developed back when drives did not have controllers embedded on them - they were more or less dumb heads and platters.  Back then, SpinRite could know exactly what MFM or RLL magnetic flux patterns were being written and where.  There were certain bit patterns that were more magnetically 'difficult' than others, and it was this information that SpinRite would use to determine which sectors were going bad. (Gibson calls this 'Defect Detection Magnetodynamics').

Gibson certainly has a flair for describing that type of technology in mumbo-jumbo, but it wasn't snake oil.  However, since drive technology has changed immensely since the early nineties, SpinRite's techniques are no longer as powerful as they used to be.  While I personally think that SpinRite is no longer a worthwhile purchase, I also don't consider it to be 'snake-oil'.  If nothing else, using it may cause the drive to move a marginal sector to a spare sector sooner than it otherwise would.  Then again, as mentioned, it could cause a failing drive to actually get worse, but I think this true of most any low-level drive utility.  And speaking from experience - it's much nicer (although never really nice) to have a drive fail on your schedule (you've usually taken some preparation for it) than just out of the blue.

But boy, there sure is something in the way that Gibson writes about his stuff that really sets some people off.

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