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

[Mike Parkhurst]

To say running some software is "completely non-destructive" is a little
naive.  The fact of the matter is that just powering on a failing hard
drive can be very destructive.  I have a hard drive platter on my wall
that suffered a bad head crash.  The heads wore off the magnetic media
to such a degree that not even the NSA could do a total recovery.

My experience has been that if Knoppix can't find the data it's gone,
though I'm sure there are cases where professional services can get the
data back.  If the data's that critical, just send the drive and a stack
of cash off to Ontrack and don't mess with it.  

Mike

On Sun, 2006-02-12 at 09:24 -0500, Reid Sayre wrote:
> 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
> 
> Instant messaging:
>   Yahoo:rlsayre
>   AIM/ICQ:soothsayre7
> 
> -- 
> TriLUG mailing list        :
> http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
> TriLUG Organizational FAQ  : http://trilug.org/faq/
> TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
> 
>