[TriLUG] hard drive recovery service - try Spin-Rite

[Pat Regan]

Reid Sayre wrote:
> Jason,
> 
> Try Spin-Rite at http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm . For $89 it's tough 
> to beat, and you may be able to get your data off your drive today or 
> tomorrow unless it's totally trashed.
> 

I have never used Spinrite, although I have heard of it.  I just skimmed
the website a little bit, though.  If it only does what I read about in
the FAQ it is probably a very bad idea to run it on a failing drive.

The FAQ seemed to claim that it does a read/write/read/write cycle
across the whole disk.  If you do this on a drive that is failing badly
enough to be making a lot of noise you will make it very, very hard to
ever recover the data afterwards.

It sounds more likely that Spinrite is meant to be used as preventative
maintenance (the FAQ recommends running it every few months).  I can
understand why that may be a good idea, and I am terribly surprised that
there isn't a open source alternative.  There is no reason something
like this can't be done on a live file system, at least in theory :).

The reason the read/write/read/write helps is because IDE drives only
remap bad sectors during a write.  In other words, if you keep hitting a
particular bad sector during a read the data will be kept in the same
place on the disk.  If you attempt to write to that same sector and it
fails, that sector will be remapped to another unused portion of the disk.

If you continually get write errors the drive is already pretty bad.  It
pretty much means that you have run out of unmapped sectors for it to
remap to.

Did I misread the Spinrite page?

Pat
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