Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room
hard drive resurrection [I'm desperate!]
superboyac:
SpinRite... fancy ascii graphics and a lot of buzzwords. And that's about it.
-f0dder (April 05, 2006, 04:40 AM)
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Whoa! I've always heard good things about SpinRite. f0dder, what do you recommend instead of spinrite, the HDD Life, or something else? Or maybe you feel none of these softwares are all that great, I'd be interested to know.
f0dder:
Well. I've never been much of a fan of Gibson, there's too much hype and buzzwords and too little factual information (one thing I'll have to credit him for, though, he's VERY good at selling himself.)
I don't doubt spinrite can do some tricks, but it's not the end-all-be-all. And I'm afraid that in some situations it could be outright dangerous to use; it puts a lot of stress on your drive, so if you have a read/write head whose arm is about to collapse, spinrite could be very unsafe.
But hey, it's ascii graphics does look cute :)
superboyac:
f0dder, what do you recommend for drive analysis or repair? Or is there no reliable way to do something like that? I'd be interested to know.
f0dder:
Well... for "analysis", I depend on what SMART monitoring. There is no such thing as a repair. If drive realloc sectors go up, and/or drive starts making strange noises, it's full-backup time, followed by a "lowlevel" format with the drive vendor's own tool. That can *sometimes* fix problems, I've had a few cases where software faults produced hardware-fault symptoms: http://www.asmcommunity.net/board/index.php?topic=17926.0 .
I don't believe in "repair" other than that - if the "lowlevel" format doesn't fix your problem, it's not fixable. And be careful that the format doesn't just use spare sectors for reallocation. Once that happens, the drive should be considered trash, and only used for unimportant things.
As for recovery, GetDataBack from www.runtime.org hasn't failed me yet. It's crap slow and a bit ugly, but it does decent data recovery.
Darwin:
Hmmm.... I've been running SpinRite on a test drive for over a week! For about three days I thought nothing was happening, but it seems to be going painfully slowly through the sectors, bit by bit. I'll let you all know how it turns out. It's a trashed notebook drive - 40 GB TravelStar. I'm beginning to suspect the fodder is on to something, though...
As for Superboyac's problem, I note this from the GetDataBack website: "Recover even when Windows doesn't recognize the drive - GetDataBack can even recover your data when the drive is no longer recognized by Windows. It can likewise be used even if all directory information - not just the root directory- is missing."
Looks like it would be worth a closer look.
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