Hard disk failure- Data Recovery

[ponder]

I disagree, it is sold as a product that will fix bad sectors by recovery, and has done on drives I've used it on.

I don't really care whether you disagree or not. The reality of the situation is the owner of the software will tell you the same, spinrite cannot fix physical defects, be it bad sectors, failing heads, stuck spindle motors or failed logic boards. If you don't believe me email him and ask him, I emailed him for schites and giggles and expected some BS marketeting spin but the guy was brutally honest. Why would you make counter claims to the guy that wrote the software, are you saying you know more about his product than he does?

The only reason why you might think spinrite fixed a bad sector or two is because the drive had spare sectors in reserve to reallocate the faulty sectors to. This is not a result of using spinrite but the drives onboard logic/firmware. If a you try and write to a bad sector and the drive picks up that it's bad it will automatically reallocate the the data to one of the spare sectors it keeps in reserve for this very purpose but this will only work until the limited amount of reserved sectors are exhausted. In essence all that spinrite does is rewrite data and if there is a bad sector the drives logic will automatically reallocate so it's not really spinrite fixing things. You can achieve exactly the same result imaging a drive and writing the image back to the drive.

PS when you email him ask him if spinrite can fix a physically defective sector or whether sector simply gets reallocate to one of the reserved ones just for clarities sake. He's not going to lie to you.

Oh, and you will not find anyone in the data recovery singing any praises for spinrite, if anything they will caution you not to bring it near your hard drive as you can potentially negate any possible future data recovery attemps by others.

But hey, like I said in the previous post, it's your data carry on

 

[bokka1]

Any reason why you did not make backups of your important data bokka1? HDD's have always/will always fail.

This is my backup drive.

I did a clean install of my PC and backed everything up to this drive.

Now everything is gone before I could recopy it to my PC.

My ****ing bad luck.

 

[ponder]

This is my backup drive.

I did a clean install of my PC and backed everything up to this drive.

Now everything is gone before I could recopy it to my PC.

My ****ing bad luck.

Don't feel bad, I've had exactly the same thing happen to me before. The upside was I realised my data was not really that important

Backup your documents & important pictures to the cloud and use a web based mail service like google and you're good.

 

[sajunky]

I think the last time I achieved anything with spinrite was back in the nineties on 5.25 MFM HDDs (10/20Mb).

My last Spinrite experience was with Miniscribe RLL (80MB?). Not even lasted for few months and started developing errors again. The subsequent use of Spinrite didn't bring satisfactory results. The truth is that it rewrites the same area many times and magnetic media has limited write cycles, heads get dirty (especially when floating over damaged area) and failing too.

For anything above MFM/RLL drives, Spinrite is neither for data recovery nor repair bad sectors:

For data recovery, the strategy is completely different: avoid the damaged areas (read these areas when everything is done).

For repairing bad sectors: Spinrite do not do repair - firmware does.

 

[DTBA]

I wonder if The drive guy... (Southbit) Could post us What type or errors we get on drivers? How the error come to be and how they fix the error's or how not to fix them ( could start a new thread and we can get a mod to sticky it... So people can go read it before doing something that will rune their HDD)

 

[sajunky]

I wonder if The drive guy... (Southbit) Could post us What type or errors we get on drivers? How the error come to be and how they fix the error's or how not to fix them ( could start a new thread and we can get a mod to sticky it... So people can go read it before doing something that will rune their HDD)

Good idea, as the same questions come over and over again. However you must specify what you are going to achieve, resque data or repair (trigger self-repair background process), or just to find out drive condition (how much you can trust it).

 

[SouthBit]

Am happy to write something, just tell me what the requirements are/common questions and I'll draft it.

 

[SouthBit]

Here's probably a good starting point, to know what all the different components do:
www.southbit.co.za/inside-a-hard-drive