Re: Summary of Recent Data Recovery Methods; Spinrite 5.0

"lexluther" <lexluther@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:GNU969991810C027lexlutherkryptongov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 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)

As far as I know there's no Spinrite hype here.

>
> 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.

It's called DiskPatch - 3 Gb shouldn't take that much time at all - and
there's a bit more DiskPatch can do than skipping sectors it can't read
immediately. But you need to make up your mind: You either clone a disk as
fast as possible (as, as you will later the say the disk may die if you
spent too much time on it) - or - you try to actually recover data from the
problem sectors which takes time.

>
> Tried Drive Rescue; pcirecovery-both stalled. Get Data Back gave 24 hour
> estimate- extremely slow in dealing with bad sectors.

Yes, all that software uses Windows API to read a disk and basically they're
waiting for Windows to discover it can not read the disk. Bottomline is that
this type of software is not really equiped to deal with 'bad' disks and
that they're primarely written with file system issues in mind.

>
> Since I had pretty much nothing to lose, I tried Sprinrite 5.0, which I
> got for free.
>
> 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.

Probably.

>
> Conclusion: xcopy data off failing drives, then clone if important data
> still remains.

Yes, that's common sense. If you can still copy files using normal methods
then do so. Using file copying software, other than sector by sector disk
cloning software which copies all sectors regardless what's in them, allows
you to prioritize and get the most important files first.

> 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.

You're mixing things up. Using SR on a disk with 10% bad sectors isn't
routine maintenance. It's the 10% bad sector causing the delay. So, when
used for routine maintenance you probably wont get those times.

> It's data recovery abilities aren't any better than Norton's Disk Doctor
> in my experience

That's because you didn't look close enough. NDD and SR do fundametally
different things.

> and it MAY kill off drives that are marginal during the
> recovery process.

That's pretty obvious, but can happen with any software.

--
Joep


.

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