Restoring old floppies to usable state

From: Paul Pennington <paulpenn_at_knology.net>
Date: Thu Feb 5 11:34:36 2004

    "chris" <cb_at_mythtech.net> wrote:

> I have a newer version of spinrite, and am VERY VERY VERY disappointed >
in it. (...)

    My experience with Spinrite was different. I used it extensively years
ago in my business. Recently, a two month old Maxtor 30 GB hard disk failed
in my wife's computer. This, of course, immediately became priority number
one!

    I upgraded my old version of Spinrite online, paying and downloading the
program in just a few minutes. Using the "save what you can" setting, I was
able to regain access to the drive and back up the data my wife had entered
to CDROM. (The drive was returned and Maxtor replaced it with a 40 GB
unit). If I had not been able to recover the data, I'm sure I would still
be hearing about it :-)

    Perhaps it's a bit unrealistic to expect a software program to fix a
hard drive in the case of a hardware failure? In the more common scenario
of gradually increasing bad sectors, Spinrite can work wonders. In my
experience, however, once drives start to go bad, they get worse. As cheap
as hard drives are today ( 50 cents a gigabyte), there's not much reason to
keep questionable ones.

PS: With regard to the subject, Spinrite will also fix floppies.

    Paul Pennington
    Augusta, Georgia
Received on Thu Feb 05 2004 - 11:34:36 GMT