[BBLISA] software hard disk recovery

[Daniel Feenberg]

On Wed, 16 Sep 2009, Brian O'Neill wrote:

> Actually Spinrite runs under FreeDOS as a standalone program. I've managed to 
> get a drive to a readable state to recover all the relevant data once (out of 
> one try), and used it on a pile of used disks to determine their worthiness 
> for re-use.

The website gives no indication of what spinrite does. Does it just keep 
trying sector reads longer than usual? That (and marking those sectors as 
bad) was plenty usefull when it was sold to owners of broken IBM AT 
computers 25 years ago. That wouldn't seem to be very usefull nowadays. 
Can it reconstruct the partition table or do anything else relevant to an 
ntfs or ext3 filesystem on a SATA drive?

Daniel Feenberg

>
> I had a test rig of a lab server with SCSI card hooked up to an old Sun SCSI 
> shoebox thoroughly testing 6 drives at a time overnight...
>
> Rob Taylor wrote:
>> I've never used it, but I've heard of spinrite.  Runs under windows and 
>> supposed to be easy to use.
>> 
>> http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
>> 
>> 
>> rgt
>> 
>> ----- "Dewey Sasser" <dewey at sasser.com> wrote:
>>  > Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
>>
>>      >
>>
>>     One of my friends windows machine died today – boots up only half
>>     way through the windows splash screen and freezes.  There is one
>>     file he wants to recover out of it, but it seems to be suffering
>>     from hardware failure because attaching the disk via USB enclosure
>>     to another computer will only let him load the USB mass storage
>>     device, and won’t go any further than that…
>>
>>
>>     So my question is …
>>
>>
>>     What are the software hard disk recovery applications that people
>>     like, which may save his file(s) and/or his dollars for him?
>>
>>
>>     Of course, free is awesome, but commercial might be ok too.
>> 
>>
>>  > I had a WD drive on a Windows machine go bad on my some months ago.  I 
>> booted system rescue CD (http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page) and used 
>> dd_rescue making multiple runs with multiple retries over about 30 hours. 
>> It managed to reduce 30 some bad blocks to only 4 or 5 unrecoverable.
>>  >
>>  > Of course, what this gets you is a drive image which you then have to 
>> mount using the loopback driver if you want to recover files.  If the file 
>> system is not mountable, there are various Linux tools which can be used to 
>> scrape through a large pile of bits and reassemble files (they work better 
>> when the sectors are consecutive).  However, I haven't used said tools for 
>> several years as they are much less certain than backups.
>>  >
>>  > I then restored the image to a good drive and ran chkdsk to verify file 
>> system integrity.  >
>>  > After I recovered what I could from the drive, I attempted to repair the 
>> drive by overwriting the bad sectors ("dd if=/dev/zero..."), which failed. 
>> I then ran WD's drive maintenance software as a requirement for warranty 
>> return and their software managed to repair the drive.  I have put it back 
>> in service in a non-critical RAID and it has worked perfectly for 6 months 
>> or so since the repair.
>>  >
>>  > --
>>  > Dewey
>>  >
>>  > _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list 
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>> 
>> 
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