Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)
My experience with Spinrite 5.0 and failing HD/floppies.
(I have no grudge to bear, purpose of post is payback for good info
gotten here; represents one user's experience, but is also meant to
counteract all the Sprinrite hype)
I had a 3 gig hd with about 5-10% bad sectors. Other HD recovery
programs stalled or would take forever to scan disk.
I had already recovered using simple xcopy most of the hd's data, with
guestimate of 5% of files that gave read errors.
After a review of most of the DR software out there, I chose not to
clone with dispatch due to it's long processing time, already recovered
most data and DP had no special recovery capabilities other than
skipping bad sectors.
Tried Drive Rescue; pcirecovery-both stalled. Get Data Back gave 24 hour
estimate- extremely slow in dealing with bad sectors.
Since I had pretty much nothing to lose, I tried Sprinrite 5.0, which I
got for free.
First I tried it on several floppies. Out of about 10 floppies I was
able to get the data back on about 6. One floppy was made totally
unusable by SR-system would not even recognize floppy was in drive. 3
others scrambled data so bad, no sense could be made of it-so much for
it's statistical processing of bad sectors, ha. Most of the floppies,
even those that I was able to recover data from, went belly up after
trying to use them first time. But about 60%, at least I got the data.
On the hard drive, totally different story. SR started going fairly
rapidly on the first portion (first 5% of drive) which, according to the
program contained no bad sectors. It got increasingly slower and slower,
with estimated finish times increasing steadily from 9 hours to 36
hours,when it then froze up (locked up my system) and I had to reboot.
The drive was toast after using SR 5.0 to "recover" the data. This drive
could have been on the verge of dieing anyways, who is to say.
Conclusion: xcopy data off failing drives, then clone if important data
still remains. ONly use Spinrite on drives that there is nothing to lose
on. My experience also leads me to believe that the extremely long
processing time of Spinrite and it's numerous rereads probably put more
stress on the drive than is acceptable even for routine maintenance.
It's data recovery abilities aren't any better than Norton's Disk Doctor
in my experience and it MAY kill off drives that are marginal during the
recovery process.
My experience with Spinrite 5.0 and failing HD/floppies.
(I have no grudge to bear, purpose of post is payback for good info
gotten here; represents one user's experience, but is also meant to
counteract all the Sprinrite hype)
I had a 3 gig hd with about 5-10% bad sectors. Other HD recovery
programs stalled or would take forever to scan disk.
I had already recovered using simple xcopy most of the hd's data, with
guestimate of 5% of files that gave read errors.
After a review of most of the DR software out there, I chose not to
clone with dispatch due to it's long processing time, already recovered
most data and DP had no special recovery capabilities other than
skipping bad sectors.
Tried Drive Rescue; pcirecovery-both stalled. Get Data Back gave 24 hour
estimate- extremely slow in dealing with bad sectors.
Since I had pretty much nothing to lose, I tried Sprinrite 5.0, which I
got for free.
First I tried it on several floppies. Out of about 10 floppies I was
able to get the data back on about 6. One floppy was made totally
unusable by SR-system would not even recognize floppy was in drive. 3
others scrambled data so bad, no sense could be made of it-so much for
it's statistical processing of bad sectors, ha. Most of the floppies,
even those that I was able to recover data from, went belly up after
trying to use them first time. But about 60%, at least I got the data.
On the hard drive, totally different story. SR started going fairly
rapidly on the first portion (first 5% of drive) which, according to the
program contained no bad sectors. It got increasingly slower and slower,
with estimated finish times increasing steadily from 9 hours to 36
hours,when it then froze up (locked up my system) and I had to reboot.
The drive was toast after using SR 5.0 to "recover" the data. This drive
could have been on the verge of dieing anyways, who is to say.
Conclusion: xcopy data off failing drives, then clone if important data
still remains. ONly use Spinrite on drives that there is nothing to lose
on. My experience also leads me to believe that the extremely long
processing time of Spinrite and it's numerous rereads probably put more
stress on the drive than is acceptable even for routine maintenance.
It's data recovery abilities aren't any better than Norton's Disk Doctor
in my experience and it MAY kill off drives that are marginal during the
recovery process.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram