taking care of bad sectors... easy stuff. Was: Re: hard drive data recovery

From: Marvin <marvin_at_rain.org>
Date: Tue Jul 14 23:17:55 1998

John Higginbotham wrote:
>
> I'll bring it back on topic: Spinrite is some powerful hoodoo. I used
> it
> alot on Seagate ST-225 drives. I'm never one to use any questionable
> sectors though: Some of those drives had less than 10mb when I was
> through
> with them. I don't trust iffy sectors.

I've used Spinrite since it first came out, and have found it to be the
best software for maintaining and sometimes fixing hard drives. I was
called in a number of years ago to try and recover the data from a HD
that was in the process of crashing and losing everything. Since it was
handy, I tried the Norton NDD (?) software to recover the data that was
unreadable. Of the four lost files, it destroyed the first three. By
that time, I gave up and invoked Spinrite. It recoverd the data
effortlessly (although it did take a bit of time :) .) Recently, a
friend brought over his HD to see what was going on with it. I ran
ScanDisk thinking it would be fairly safe. No such luck, and again, a
bunch of data got destroyed. Sometime after that, I acquired the
current version of Spinrite and tried it on the drive. It instantly
complained that the drive and the drive settings differed along with a
few other tips. Turned out that LBA somehow got turned off in the BIOS
and thus corrupted the disk. I truely hate the brain-damaged program
ScanDisk as nothing more than a Trojan Horse! Microsoft should have
known better than to put out something like that. I have *never* had a
problem with Spinrite although that probably includes only a few hundred
drives I have worked on.
Received on Tue Jul 14 1998 - 23:17:55 BST