[BBLISA] software hard disk recovery

[Brian O'Neill]

Actually Spinrite runs under FreeDOS as a standalone program. I've 
managed to get a drive to a readable state to recover all the relevant 
data once (out of one try), and used it on a pile of used disks to 
determine their worthiness for re-use.

I had a test rig of a lab server with SCSI card hooked up to an old Sun 
SCSI shoebox thoroughly testing 6 drives at a time overnight...

Rob Taylor wrote:
> I've never used it, but I've heard of spinrite.  Runs under windows and 
> supposed to be easy to use.
> 
> http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
> 
> 
> rgt
> 
> ----- "Dewey Sasser" <dewey at sasser.com> wrote:
>  > Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> 
>      >
> 
>     One of my friends windows machine died today – boots up only half
>     way through the windows splash screen and freezes.  There is one
>     file he wants to recover out of it, but it seems to be suffering
>     from hardware failure because attaching the disk via USB enclosure
>     to another computer will only let him load the USB mass storage
>     device, and won’t go any further than that…
> 
>      
> 
>     So my question is …
> 
>      
> 
>     What are the software hard disk recovery applications that people
>     like, which may save his file(s) and/or his dollars for him?
> 
>      
> 
>     Of course, free is awesome, but commercial might be ok too.
> 
> 
>  > I had a WD drive on a Windows machine go bad on my some months ago.  
> I booted system rescue CD (http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page) and used 
> dd_rescue making multiple runs with multiple retries over about 30 
> hours.  It managed to reduce 30 some bad blocks to only 4 or 5 
> unrecoverable.
>  >
>  > Of course, what this gets you is a drive image which you then have to 
> mount using the loopback driver if you want to recover files.  If the 
> file system is not mountable, there are various Linux tools which can be 
> used to scrape through a large pile of bits and reassemble files (they 
> work better when the sectors are consecutive).  However, I haven't used 
> said tools for several years as they are much less certain than backups.
>  >
>  > I then restored the image to a good drive and ran chkdsk to verify 
> file system integrity. 
>  >
>  > After I recovered what I could from the drive, I attempted to repair 
> the drive by overwriting the bad sectors ("dd if=/dev/zero..."), which 
> failed.  I then ran WD's drive maintenance software as a requirement for 
> warranty return and their software managed to repair the drive.  I have 
> put it back in service in a non-critical RAID and it has worked 
> perfectly for 6 months or so since the repair.
>  >
>  > --
>  > Dewey
>  >
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> 
> 
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