[BBLISA] software hard disk recovery

[John P. Rouillard]

In message <Pine.GSO.4.64.0909161907070.28120 at nber6.nber.org>,
Daniel Feenberg writes:
>> 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.

Why wouldn't it be? Bad block recoverery and remapping
is always useful. Now will it take forever on large
disks. Yup.

If you are asking if it supports SATA, I am not sure,
but I think I have seen dos boot disks on UBCD that
seem to support SATA, so it's not out of the question.

>Can it reconstruct the partition table or do anything
>else relevant to an ntfs or ext3 filesystem on a SATA
>drive?

Not that I can see from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinRite it looks like the
standard:

   keep rereading the sector till you get good
   data and move that data to another (hopefully good)
   sector.

If your sector is really toast well you are out of
luck.

I use fsck or chkdsk to do the filesystem
checking. Data recovery tools operate at a lower level.

--
				-- rouilj
John Rouillard
===========================================================================
My employers don't acknowledge my existence much less my opinions.