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

[Reid Sayre]

Pat and Jason,

Spin-Rite has several levels of test/recovery. The first is a read-only 
scan and verification test. It is completely non-destructive but will 
tell you how many errors there are. The second will try to recover 
unreadable data. Higher numbers do more function with the highest level 
being the most preventative.

The whole recovery process depends, of course, on the importance of the 
data and your budget for recovering it. The last time a drive failed on 
my desktop system (before I saw Spin-Rite), estimates started at $1000 
and went up from there. Time estimates started at a week and went up 
from there. If you go to Google and search for "data recovery service" 
you will get a lot of good candidates.

Finally, from a "lessons learned" perspective, you will probably be more 
diligent about backup after this. There are various on-line backup tools 
for this and there has been some discussion on this list lately. For the 
moment, I use a service  from http://www.ibackup.com for my critical 
files (not particularly valuable to other people, but hard to recreate 
if lost). Every morning about 2:30, the client agent wakes up and sends 
a copy of all the files that are changed up to the service. They have 
their own client for Windows and use rsync for Linux. I sleep a lot 
easier at night now. I have no business interest in ibackup other than 
as a satisfied customer.

Reid Sayre

Pat Regan wrote:

>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
>  
>

-- 
Reid Sayre
rlsayre at bellsouth.net

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