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Running SpinRite on a drive......


ross549

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Ao32hmA.jpg

 

This is taking forever!

 

For reference, the first 69% took about an hour..... the last 7% has been the majority of the time.

 

Ztqjyxo.jpg

 

This drive is going to die soon.

 

:'(

 

Adam

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securitybreach

Can you imagine how long a terabyte or multiple terabytes would take? It has taken you 250+ hours for a 60gb drive.... Nuts >_

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If a drive is fully healthy, it would still take a few hours to run through the whole process. In this case, it is attempting to repair damage.

 

http://media.grc.com/video/wid.mp4

 

Here is Steve explaining exactly what this software does. :)

 

I am a believer in it, and supported Steve's work through the purchase of SpinRite 4 years ago.

 

Adam

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Guest LilBambi

I have known about Steve Gibson for MANY years. The first time I heard of Steve Gibson was a screensaver, ChromaZone and later, used OptOut for the year that it was in service.

 

OptOut was the predecessor of current anti-spyware programs. in fact, Steve updated OptOut until Lavasoft's Ad-Aware at that time "took off and ran with the OptOut concept", They were doing a great job at that time and faithfully updated the definitions and Steve suggested we all move to Ad-Aware at that time, and he retired OptOut.

 

SpinRite -- I fell in love with it and would have loved to snag it back when he first came out with it, but it was not required until about 4-5 yrs ago. It was one of the best investments I have made for hard drive maintenance and non-destructive salvage. SpinRite is amazing!

 

If you are not already familiar with SpinRite's more than two decade history of

seemingly miraculous data recovery, or if you are not sure SpinRite is for you, please

take a few minutes to read some true-life stories from SpinRite's users.

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Hello,

 

I've had SpinRite licenses for a long time but rarely use it as it is a tool of last resort. If a drive is dying, I will try to copy off whatever data on it isn't on the existing backups for that drive, and then replace it. The old drive then gets RMA'd (if under warranty) or disassembled (if out of warranty). If nothing else, the logic boards may have value to someone else as a replacement part.

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

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Guest LilBambi

Actually, it is not just a tool of last resort....

 

From SpinRite's Q&A Page:

 

 

How often should SpinRite be run for preventive maintenance?

 

This is mostly a matter of personal taste. For example, how often should you backup your data? However, a general rule of thumb would be that SpinRite should be run every two or three months. Running it more often provides greater safety at the expense of the time consumed. Running it less often provides more opportunity for new problems to go undetected until they become severe. Once every few months should be often enough to catch and detect any early trouble.

 

 

SpinRite's Defect Surface Defect Page:

 

 

SpinRite is THE WORLD'S ONLY Non-

Destructive Surface Defect Analysis Utility!

 

Unlike any other utility software, SpinRite's time-proven technology allows it to safely scrub your drive's data storage surfaces WHILE THEY ARE IN USE and fully loaded with your data! This means that you can run SpinRite whenever you wish to make sure that your drive's data is ALL safe and sound!

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burninbush

My experience with hard disks goes back to the day when only minicomputers and bigger got hard disks -- those $35k washing-machine sized monsers with removable disk packs. You had to know how to replace individual heads and align them using special alignment disk-packs.

 

I was an early user of SpinRite -- back in the mid 1980's when home users first got hard drives -- those 10mb drives he talks about. In that era, home disks used stepper motors to position heads, and his idea of making a micro-offset of head position by approaching a track from different directions by using long and short seeks, etc -- made some sense. But on modern drives that use an embedded servo track to position the heads he's just wasting your time.

 

And then there is the very disquieting bit where he talks [in the video] about recreating data by trying different bit patterns in the spot where there is missing data -- that's just plain scary if you have critical stuff on your disk. Each 512-byte sector has at the end a 16-bit CRC word -- but there are many possible 512-byte data patterns that will produce the same CRC value. And how would he know that it's not the CRC word that is corrupted? I would not trust any recreated data.

 

Verified backups -- that's how to protect data reliably. Adam, imagine how much less time you'd have wasted if you had a couple of good images on hand. Serious people with important data need to do backups, it's as simple as that.

 

Kudos to the commercial skill of this guy -- for still selling a 20+ year-old product. Sorry for being grumpy about SpinRite, but I think he's a charlatan.

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It would be awfully presumptuous to assume this was my hard drive that was being recovered. It is not. I maintain backups as well- and in multiple locations.

 

If you don't think his software is worth the money, then by all means don't buy it.

 

Please don't insult my intelligence by lecturing me on how to manage my data.

 

Adam

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burninbush

It would be awfully presumptuous to assume this was my hard drive that was being recovered. It is not. I maintain backups as well- and in multiple locations.

 

If you don't think his software is worth the money, then by all means don't buy it.

 

Please don't insult my intelligence by lecturing me on how to manage my data.

 

Adam

 

 

Well, the way it reads here is that you and L. Bambi are validating the product. And you didn't say it wasn't your disk, how would anybody know from reading this thread?

 

I gotta ask, did it eventually work? Did you recover everything? How many more hours did it take?

 

What I would like to see from SpinRite is another video, wherein he discusses his program with a couple drive engineers from [say] Seagate and WD. I think he would not publish that one.

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Guest LilBambi

Everyone is entitled to their opinion on products. Adam and I have both had great luck with SpinRite. Your mileage may vary.

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Well, the way it reads here is that you and L. Bambi are validating the product.

......

I gotta ask, did it eventually work? Did you recover everything? How many more hours did it take?

 

LilBambi and I are both happy users of the product.

 

The scan/recovery is still going. Once it is done, I will reboot the machine into a linux distro and yank any data I can from the drive.

 

As noted in the second picture in the first post, some sectors have been recovered. Right now, that number is about half recovered, half are partially or completely failed.

 

I think this drive had a head crash.

 

Adam

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Guest LilBambi

Hard to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as my Mother was want to say... in today's vernacular, Garbage in, Garbage out. ;)

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burninbush

Hard to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as my Mother was want to say... in today's vernacular, Garbage in, Garbage out. ;)

 

 

LOL -- and as Forrest Gump's mother would say, "useless is as useless does."

 

Sorry, couldn't resist. I'm betting that even Mr. Spinrite would agreee that spending 12 days for so little gain is a lost cause.

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securitybreach

LOL -- and as Forrest Gump's mother would say, "useless is as useless does."

 

Sorry, couldn't resist. I'm betting that even Mr. Spinrite would agreee that spending 12 days for so little gain is a lost cause.

 

Sure you meant to misquote....B)

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SpinRite finished last night!

 

Total time was 340 hours, 32 minutes, and 8 seconds. 1,784 sectors were recovered, and 1,550 sectors were at least partially unrecoverable.

 

Sadly, I will not be able to attempt to extract the data on the drive until this weekend, as I have some prior obligations. :(

 

I will report on my success/failure!

 

Adam

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Wow, 340 hours... about time.... B)

 

 

I wonder what is the difference between 'partially unrecoverable' and 'unrecoverable' sectors? And then of course, recovering sectors is not the same as recovering files -- depends on how the remaining bad are distributed. And those sectors called recovered might have been in unallocated regions of the disk. Could result in a net gain of zero.

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I wonder what is the difference between 'partially unrecoverable' and 'unrecoverable' sectors? And then of course, recovering sectors is not the same as recovering files -- depends on how the remaining bad are distributed. And those sectors called recovered might have been in unallocated regions of the disk. Could result in a net gain of zero.

 

According to the documentation, sectors are are marked as unrecovered if less than 100% of the data is recovered. It does not specify any more detail than that.

 

And this is sector based recovery, so the program does not care about the data format.

 

Adam

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Well, I received a USB to PATA/SATA adapter today, and I am starting to pull data from the drive. It is disconnecting from the computer after a random period of time, so I am grabbing files as I can.

 

This may take some time, but I am getting hundreds of MB as quickly as I can.

 

Adam

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Hello,

 

Thanks for keeping us up-to-date. I look forward to hearing the final results.

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

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Long story short....

 

There were about 20GB of pics and MP3 files that the user was interested in. After several hours of work, I was able to get everything except for about a dozen pictures. The drive mostly behaved itself unless I was copying more than a couple hundred megabytes at a time.

 

I burned all the data to several DVDs and returned the discs to the owner. The drive is absolutely dead, and it will no longer exist in a computer, so I made it into a trophy of sorts. My wife may want me to take it down from the mantle......

 

16566_10151719253158744_1385467678_n.jpg

 

:lol:

 

Adam

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