46 replies to this topic

[geek-accountant]

I think he added the iPhone part at the end just to get back at me.

[vinylfreak]

I just looked it up as I wanted to use it. The thing cost $89!! Is it really worth $89 and if so, why?

Yes
IMHO it is. SpinRite has saved my bacon on more than one occasion.
If you deal with a lot of spinning discs, I would highly recommend it.
It does do disc repair, and as others have mentioned many times it will allow you to pull valuable data off of a drive
that is on its way to the grave.

[dvn]

I think he added the iPhone part at the end just to get back at me.

Oh. Ha! Tapatalk puts its little sig in there. So ya! Go APPLE iPhone!!! Can't wait for the new iPhone 4S2, can you? hahaha...

[dvn]

Yes
IMHO it is. SpinRite has saved my bacon on more than one occasion.
If you deal with a lot of spinning discs, I would highly recommend it.
It does do disc repair, and as others have mentioned many times it will allow you to pull valuable data off of a drive
that is on its way to the grave.

Anyone ever try HDD Regenerator? 30-day trial. $59 for license. Just curious.

Let's be clear here. SpinRite does no physical repair of sectors. It cannot.

• SpinRite merely uses a specifically-designed algorithm to keep shooting the head at a 'problem' sector until it retrieves all data, if possible. Or however much of the data it can before the attempts time out.

In that respect, it does a nice job. So if your drive's main problem is a bad write or physical degradation of a small area of the platter surface which would keep you from reading data from a previously written sector, SpinRite just might help. But if your drive is suffering mechanical problems with the head, spindle or motor, SpinRite can possibly do it in. So you have to weigh it. Do you get whatever data you can from your drive before running SpinRite? Maybe you should, just in case the drive dies during 'repair'.

[ImTheTypeOfGuy]

(*no way I'm selling the Zune. Gonna be a collector's item some day!)


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I believe that day is now.

[dvn]

I believe that day is now.

I'm going to wait until I can go on 'Antiques Roadshow' so I can really cash in, so to speak.

[jmwills]

As a device, it does what it is supposed to do. The software.....blows iTunes out of the water,

[ImTheTypeOfGuy]

As a device, it does what it is supposed to do. The software.....blows iTunes out of the water,

I don't like the rating system. If they changed that to I would definitely want to use it. But, given I have an ipod and the wife has an ipad, I am glad they don't change it because then I would want to switch and it doesn't work with that hardware.

[dvn]

So Don, before we get much further off topic, did you get your answer about SpinRite?

[vinylfreak]

Anyone ever try HDD Regenerator? 30-day trial. $59 for license. Just curious.

Let's be clear here. SpinRite does no physical repair of sectors. It cannot.

• SpinRite merely uses a specifically-designed algorithm to keep shooting the head at a 'problem' sector until it retrieves all data, if possible. Or however much of the data it can before the attempts time out.

In that respect, it does a nice job. So if your drive's main problem is a bad write or physical degradation of a small area of the platter surface which would keep you from reading data from a previously written sector, SpinRite just might help. But if your drive is suffering mechanical problems with the head, spindle or motor, SpinRite can possibly do it in. So you have to weigh it. Do you get whatever data you can from your drive before running SpinRite? Maybe you should, just in case the drive dies during 'repair'.

Yes Rich, that is correct.
I never meant to imply that a piece of software could actually do a physical repair of hardware.
SpinRite works very well for what it was designed to do.

[dvn]

I know you weren't implying. I just wanted to make it clear to anyone unfamiliar with SpinRite.

fwiw - I've heard Scott Moulton say that SpinRite is probably the best software approach to data recovery he's ever seen. That's saying a lot coming from him. His only beef is that he'd like to see SR writing to a new drive in case the 'bad' drive should fail completely while running SR on it. He was talking specifically about recovering data from corrupt or 'unreadable' sectors.

[ikon]

fwiw - I've heard Scott Moulton say that SpinRite is probably the best software approach to data recovery he's ever seen. That's saying a lot coming from him. His only beef is that he'd like to see SR writing to a new drive in case the 'bad' drive should fail completely while running SR on it. He was talking specifically about recovering data from corrupt or 'unreadable' sectors.

That's not a bad idea at all; wonder if anyone has suggested it to Steve?

From my point of view, one of the major issues with SpinRite is that it so often fixes drives without giving any indication that it did anything; it makes people think it's less effective than it really is. I would like to see Steve change SpinRite so:

• when it moves to a new cluster to test, it changes the indicator for the new cluster to a 0;
• each time the cluster has to be re-read, the indicator is increased by 1;
• the cluster indicator is changed to a + sign for the 10th and subsequent re-reads.

I think it might also be nice if SpinRite could allow you to keep a log for each drive, so you could have a history.

[Symo]

Hi all, this seemed like a good place to ask the following question:

Does/can SpinRite work with a GPT disk?

I now have a few large drives (2 or 3 TB), I would like yo run spinrite on them to keep them healthy (and know for sure that they're healthy). I've got a number of drives pooled together in a windows 8 box with DrivePool and have them monitored by the scanner product that does with it...the scanner has reported some sector issues on a couple of the drives, but knowing about it isn't enough, I need yo do something about it...

The way I understand it, these large drives need to be configured as GPT to have the full size available to use...

[jmwills]

I don't see why it wouldn't.  GRC does a forum where this question could be asked.

[no-control]

The way I understand it, these large drives need to be configured as GPT to have the full size available to use...

 

Specifically they need to be GPT to have a partition/volume of more than 2TB. MBR can be used to divide the large space up as an option/alternative to GPT. ie 3x 1TB volumes.

[ikon]

I have been unable to use SpinRite on 3TB drives. I believe they're too large for the underlying version of DOS that SpinRite comes with. I've heard rumours that Steve is working on a fix, but Steve works in his own timeframe, so I wouldn't hold my breath for a fix in the very near future.

 

I've also heard a rumour that using one of the most recent versions of genuine MS DOS, instead of the FreeDOS that comes with SR, can get around the issue. I have been unable to locate any of my old versions of DOS to test with. I'm afraid I may have dumped the diskettes during one of my cleanout sessions

[jmwills]

But you could partition into a 2TB and a 1TB and make it work, right?

[ikon]

Not sure; haven't tried that. It might work.

[joem]

SR hasn't been updated in ages and I have had mixed success using it on various drives as time goes by.  Steve is always saying he is going to update it, but never does.  This refrain has been ongoing for several years now.   I would use it as only as a last resort for data recovery.  And as for conditioning hard disks before putting them into production, that is fine if you have the time. It will recover data and insert it on a good sector on the same hard drive.  Really?  I know the expensive data recovery options recover the data and write it to another drive as it recovers.  And Scott Moulton also takes exception to that.  In its class SR is fine. 

[ikon]

Scott may take exception. My take is that Scott misses the point & purpose of SR. It is not, primarily, a data recovery tool. Rather, it is a drive maintenance tool that happens to make it possible to recover data in many cases.