On June 30, 2008 10:59:16 am James Knott wrote:
By copying the sectors to another drive, you may be able to fix defective sectors by using a sector editor. If you mess up, you just start again on a copy, without having to go back to the original drive. By fixing the defective sectors, you may now be able to recover the data. If you operate directly on the defective drive, a mistake may make data recovery impossible. Again, if you can read enough for Spinright to work, you can read enough to copy the sectors and working on a copy is always safer than on the original. Also, in order to copy the original sectors from a defective drive, you need the appropriate tools that will make multiple attempts to read a sector etc., instead of just passing over the error. Any decent sector repair tool should be able to do that.
I don't think you understand what Spinrite (not Spinright) actually does, James. Spinrite is a stand-alone DOS program designed to refurbish hard drives, floppy disks and recover data from marginally or completely unreadable hard drives and floppy disks and from partitions and folders which have become unreadable. When it encounters a sector with errors that cannot be corrected by the disk drives' error correcting code it tries to read the sector up to 2000 times, and tries to determine the most probable value of each bit by comparing the results. The data is then saved onto a new block of the same disk; it cannot be saved elsewhere. It's not a file undelete or defrag utility. -- bob@rsmits.ca -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org