use Spinrite ???

[wpshooter]

Should the Gibson Research Spinrite program be used on hard drives to be sure that the drives integrity is as good as possible before actually utilizing a drive or are some of the drive testing utilities (such as PC-Doctor) that are found in other hardware testing suites capable of doing as good a job as Spinrite ?

Thanks.

 

[Dadofamunky]

In my experience, it takes too long to do anything meaningful. I bought it about a year ago to try to rescue a 250GB drive and the darn thing worked and worked overnight, only to give me fatal errors.

It was a great program in its time; I used it a lot in the distant past. I even know (or used to know) the man who publishes SpinRite, Steve Gibson. Great guy. But drive technology has passed Spinrite by. Save your money.

 

[EarthwormJim]

Originally posted by: Dadofamunky
In my experience, it takes too long to do anything meaningful. I bought it about a year ago to try to rescue a 250GB drive and the darn thing worked and worked overnight, only to give me fatal errors.

It was a great program in its time; I used it a lot in the distant past. I even know (or used to know) the man who publishes SpinRite, Steve Gibson. Great guy. But drive technology has passed Spinrite by. Save your money.

Spinrite helped me restore my mom's hard drive just last month.

Since spinrite is only software, it's hit or miss with a physical device like a hard drive. It can only do so much.

 

[Madinat]

maybe i'm not doing something right here. i used spinrite to restore data to my 500gb external about a week ago. i used option 2, which is the recover data option and had noting but problems with it. firstly it didn't give me an option to save the recovered data to another location and secondly it took 10 days to finish. once it did finish and i rebooted my system, everything started back up, just like it was, and the broke HDD was still broke. to this day i have no idea what happened to it.
-->okay i take that back. i used pcinspector file recovery and "recovered" some files to rubbish, but it made me hopeful that a more powerful program might do the trick. i'd really like to recover my data, most of it is not important but i do have some video and pictures i hadn't backed up anywhere else (b/c that drive was supposed to be the backup) so i'd really really like to get this data back. can anyone help pls?

 

[Rubycon]

First of all Spinrite is not recovery software like R-Studio. It simply tries to recover data from blocks that are damaged and relocate this data to free space. If you run out of good blocks you will lose data. Also severe media defects and damage are not going to be recovered nor is a drive whose controller (PCB) is damaged and/or malfunctioning. What SpinRite is excellent for is getting a drive up and running to get a system back up so proper action can be taken. It's much safer than running CHKDSK which in any case you think the drive is having problems (clicking but still working) CHKDSK is risky. There's lots of information at grc.com from Steve Gibson how the program actually works and what's going on "behind the scenes" so to speak.

 

[Madinat]

Originally posted by: Rubycon
First of all Spinrite is not recovery software like R-Studio. It simply tries to recover data from blocks that are damaged and relocate this data to free space. If you run out of good blocks you will lose data. Also severe media defects and damage are not going to be recovered nor is a drive whose controller (PCB) is damaged and/or malfunctioning. What SpinRite is excellent for is getting a drive up and running to get a system back up so proper action can be taken. It's much safer than running CHKDSK which in any case you think the drive is having problems (clicking but still working) CHKDSK is risky. There's lots of information at grc.com from Steve Gibson how the program actually works and what's going on "behind the scenes" so to speak.

thanks for your response. i'd been to the grc site and i agree that there is a lot of info on there. that's exactly my problem, lol. too much info--most of which did not help me answer the question of "why was pcinspector able to see my data when other programs did not?"

i think what you're saying is that if there are no good sectors there's no recovery, and i understand that all well and good (if that's even what you're saying). but why can't i recover the data to another drive? the new drive doesn't have any problems. i also don't think there's any physical damage to the drive. it just started reading errors a lot, then stopped reading at all. now all windows give me the option to do is format the drive when i plug it in.

 

[Rubycon]

Try downloading the demo of RStudio; http://www.r-studio.com/ and see what it finds. If you can recover your files it's worth buying.

 

[Madinat]

thanks a lot for your help!

 

[pugh]

Thanks for that great link Ruby. I passed it on to someone who is in need also.

 

[Madinat]

Originally posted by: Rubycon
Try downloading the demo of RStudio; http://www.r-studio.com/ and see what it finds. If you can recover your files it's worth buying.

OMG. this program was a godsend. i was just hoping to recover pictures, but this took care of EVERYTHING (and even some deleted files i didn't want) it was like a magic wand was waved and everything was restored. huzzah!!!

it took a while to scan (about 22 hours for my 500GB external) but obviously it was worth the wait.

viva R-Studio!!!

 

[qwertz]

I used it back in the days when I had a broken IBM Deskstar drive (just clicking noises) - It took 24 hours to finish and by the sounds it really tortured my drive, but I got it back running again long enough to save all my data from it. It was the only program at that time that helped me. I don't know if it's still the no.1 choice nowadays, though.

 

[JesseKnows]

Originally posted by: Madinat
i think what you're saying is that if there are no good sectors there's no recovery, and i understand that all well and good (if that's even what you're saying). but why can't i recover the data to another drive?

The kind of recovery Spinrite provides in on the bit and byte level, on the same drive. If the surface can be coaxed to yield the data, the data is extracted and then the sector subsituted.

You seem to need a recovery tools where the data can be recovered on the file level, after a corruption in the allocation structures. RStudio and the like can help you there.