[NLRS] OT: Hard Drive recovery?

[tom ring]

On 30 Jun 2010 at 21:09, Doug Reed wrote:
<snip>
> 
> I've also tried a program called Spinrite for fixing weak sector 
> problems on hard drives that don't want to boot. Spinrite is a 
> commercial program (www.grc.com) written in assembly language that does 
> similar to the program Jerry wrote. Spinrite has both "repair" and 
> "maintenance" modes. Repair mode does a sector scan and retries any bad 
> sectors until they read correctly, then writes it back. It can take 
> hours to read a bad sector and it also starts to do a statistical repair 
> by looking for the bits that are changing. Maintenance mode reads every 
> sector then writes it back to freshen the disk surface. I've used the 
> Spinrite program to freshen a couple laptop drives and on a couple 
> desktop machines. I didn't always notice an improvement so I can only 
> say the program does something but only works on a sub-set of possible 
> hard drive problems. It obviously can't fix physical hard drive 
> problems. It also can't solve Windows write problems such as I had before.

I have been using SpinRite for 24 years.  Yes it's been around that long.

The first place it counted was at LM Ericsson.  I had a copy (5 and a quarter 
floppy) with me when I went to Stockholm just in case my not quite state of the 
art Compaq exercise weight had an HD issue.  The local guys had a problem with 
an important drive on a server.  They were getting read errors as well as write 
errors on a gigantic 10 or 20 MB drive they had.  When everything is text it's 
amazing how much useful information can fit in a hundred K.

Anyway, it read the damaged sectors, rewrote them to verified good sectors, and 
recovered a lot of files LME was panicking over.

It works better now.

tom
K0TAR