21 Oct
2004
21 Oct
'04
12:40 p.m.
Steve Gibson shouldn't be a strange name for this list.
Google tells me that SpinRite's been mentioned a few
times in 2003 and 2004.
I recently bought a copy of his SpinRite and I'm trying
to get my head around exactly when it's useful. The manual
isn't much help.
Right now it's chugging away on a circa 1987 floppy that
lost its shutter, rattled around in an envelope, and today
has CRC errors. Not a rare disk, just something I'd like
to see if it can recover. It's busy re-reading bad sectors
hundreds of times to make its best guess at the data.
A few days ago I tried SpinRite on a contemporary PC's hard
drive that would error-out when writing to two spots on
the disk. At its strongest correction level, SpinRite
found the errors but the disk wasn't "repaired" in the
sense that I expected: I thought it would somehow map-out
the areas that had errors, and let me continue to rescue
the drive's data. It didn't. Writing to the drive still
failed.
(I successfully read both partitions with a Knoppix CD and with
R-Studio NE, but I wanted to bring the system back to life
enough to let HP's WinXP create its recovery CDs.)
So to keep this on-topic, when exactly can SpinRite help rescue
old hard drives and floppies?
And to state the obvious, SpinRite can't raise the dead.
I tried it on a drive that was alive enough to be recognized
by the BIOS, but if SpinRite can't make it spin or read,
it can't help.
- John
21 Oct
21 Oct
1:59 p.m.
John Foust wrote:
So to keep this on-topic, when exactly can SpinRite
help rescue
old hard drives and floppies?
I've used it to good effect in getting data off failing disks. I
never considered using it to extend the life of a disk that's failing.
To me, that feels like trying to get one last drink of the soured milk.
Anyway, SpinRite will move and map recoverable data to good sectors
so you can *read* the files without read errors. It's slow as the
epoch, but it seems to do a better job of recovery than the other tools
I've used.
The only time SpinRite didn't do me any good at all was when the
luser with the bad hard drive, after being advised to shut it down till
I got back in town, got antsy and ran MS-DOS Scandisk on it about 20
times. We didn't get much data back.
And to state the obvious, SpinRite can't raise the
dead.
I tried it on a drive that was alive enough to be recognized
by the BIOS, but if SpinRite can't make it spin or read,
it can't help.
Time for the other kind of medium - a seance. :)
Doc
23 Oct
23 Oct
2:36 a.m.
At 08:59 PM 10/21/2004, you wrote:
I've used it to good effect in getting data off
failing disks. I never considered using it to extend the life of a disk that's
failing. To me, that feels like trying to get one last drink of the soured milk.
Yes, of course. But SpinRite also makes me wrinkle my nose:
it seems potentially tremendously valuable for its recovery
skills of marginal data, but why on Earth does it want to
re-write back to the same media? Why not recover to another
file or disk?
It violates the Hippocratic oath of data recovery: at least do no harm.
Recovering data from an old disk means the risk of putting the media
in a drive, but that's small in my mind with the risk (or sense) of
trying to write back to it. Am I missing some feature in the SpinRite
interface that would let me recover data to a second disk?
The only time SpinRite didn't do me any good at all
was when the luser with the bad hard drive, after being advised to shut it down till I got
back in town, got antsy and ran MS-DOS Scandisk on it about 20 times. We didn't get
much data back.
I had that a few months ago, too. When I'm called in to fix
a minor software problem on someone's computer, I rarely make a
full backup before I touch it. It's a cost issue, a time issue,
a practical issue. I fixed this fellow's problems, demonstrated
to him several times that the system would reboot, warm and cold,
without error.
Two hours after I left, he had an error on shutdown. On restart,
Scandisk ran, found an error, and he answered "no" when it asked
to fix the error. Presto, scragged hard disk. 50 megs of email lost.
In this case, I had backed-up his email to a zip file but put it
on the hard disk. He had no other backup. He'd never made one.
I spent another ten hours out of guilt on my dime to attempt to
recover his data with R-Studio www.r-studio.com . No go. The zip
was gone, the mailbox was gone.
Who's at fault? I know that if I pulled out of the car repair shop,
drove ten miles and the engine fell out, I'd blame the repair shop.
I've spent a hundreds of dollars on tools for data recovery:
DriveCopy, Partition Magic, Ghost, R-Studio, SpinRite...
but none is a Swiss army knife, and I've got gripes about each.
- John
7366
days inactive
7368
days old
2 comments
2 participants
participants (2)
-
doc＠mdrconsult.com -
jfoust＠threedee.com