Recommended software to recover data from faulty hard drive?

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

Thank you, Ted, for the interesting advice and link. It is much less
expensive than Ontrack recovery suite, and I like the spirit of the GRC
group.

- Frederic W. Erk, EIHSD.

> hop over to grc.com and buy spinrite
> regards
> ted
>
>

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

Frederic W. Erk wrote:

> In fact, several of my colleagues complained about data loss. I examined
> their disks on my PC. These were IBM Deskstar hard disk drives, in fact
> Hitachi 60 GXP ones, according to IBM technical support. I downloaded and
> used Hitachi disk recovery utility. It repaired the disk errors, but the
> data was erased, too. Hence I wondered: what would I do to prevent this
> from happening to me?

Assume that your drives are going to fail. Just take it as a given like
death and taxes. Prepare for the eventuality just like you do with death
and taxes.

If you're seeing multiple failures over a short time period there's some
kind of external cause, and the thing to do about it not to obtain some
kind of purported sofware fix but to find out what's killing them (power
problems, heat, vibration, etc) and correct it. And don't assume because
you have a big power supply and a UPS that you aren't seeing power
problems. I've seen brand name power supplies with plenty of reserve
capacity periodically drop the voltage on one rail or another below spec
and a few minutes later pick it back up again. That one's hard to catch.

But that just prolongs the life of the drives. Set up some kind of backup
strategy and use it. Also consider some kind of RAID--that is not a
substitute for a backup strategy though, it's a supplement.

> - Frederic W. Erk, EIHSD.

--
--John
Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)