On 02/06/06, Leendert Meyer wrote:

On Friday 02 June 2006 09:16, Ralph Ellis wrote:

...

SpinRite from Gibson Research Corporation. It is operating system neutral ... Cons - expensive $90 US

LOL, that proggy was already there in my DOS days. It wouldn't surprise me if it's 15 years old. It's price did certainly improve (from a sellers POV). ;)

Cheers,

Leen

Is it really any better than the free utility software that one can get from a disk manufacturers own site? Genuine question, I'm not trying to start some argument. Just what does it do that the manufacturers software doesn't? -- ============================================== I am only human, please forgive me if I make a mistake it is not deliberate. ============================================== PLEASE DON'T drink and drive it's not clever, it's just stupid. Kevan Farmer Linux user #373362 Cheslyn Hay Staffordshire WS6 7HR -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

Rajko M wrote:

Kevanf1 wrote:

...

On 02/06/06, Leendert Meyer wrote:

...

On Friday 02 June 2006 09:16, Ralph Ellis wrote:

...

SpinRite from Gibson Research Corporation. It is operating system neutral ... Cons - expensive $90 US

LOL, that proggy was already there in my DOS days. It wouldn't surprise me if it's 15 years old. It's price did certainly improve (from a sellers POV). ;)

Cheers,

Leen

Is it really any better than the free utility software that one can get from a disk manufacturers own site? Genuine question, I'm not trying to start some argument. Just what does it do that the manufacturers software doesn't?

Consider interests of both vendors.

HD manufacturers want to sell another drive, but want to prevent bad reputation, so they will diagnose HD fairly and that is about it.

The SpinRite vendor wants to sell product, and $90 is not really bargain, so they will try to make it very useful. Once you buy it you can have it for all drives that you want to rescue, so they depend on your recommendation for further sales. Very strong motive to make good product. BTW, they are located on http://grc.com that is probably more known by free (firewall) port checking.

I think that part of the reason for the pricing is that people usually buy this product when their drive is toast and they need to get the data off now. If you don't have a good backup setup and you have an emergency then $90 is cheap. But if you have a disk image or full system backup and you can just format the drive an restore then you may not need the software. It basically allows you to get your data back and recondition your hard drive without a reformat. Ralph Ellis -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Sunday 2006-06-11 at 06:31 -0700, Carl William Spitzer IV wrote:

"SpinRite is able to operate on all Windows XP NTFS formats, all DOS FAT, all Linux file systems, Novell, Macintosh (if temporarily moved into a PC) or anything else"

If they work at the hardware level, the filesystem is irrelevant. What they do, I'm guessing, is try to read the data from bad sectors (one way is to read multiple times and do an average), and then remap the sector to a good one. Modern disks have some space reserved by the manufacturers for this very purpose. Just trying to write to a bad sector will automatically trigger the remap, if enabled, in a way that is totally transparent to the operating system (even when running). It may happen any time. You can see the remap counter using a smart utility, like smartctl in linux. - -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFEjCVBtTMYHG2NR9URAkouAJoCkNH5OB/O48ciLc4G2ASQK4YfNgCfWtgN FCCWSQwUFhV9AX8m47tGfCw= =x+tH -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com