[SLE] Hard Drive Maintenance and Recovery Utility
I just thought that I would toss in a good word for a hard drive utility that I used recently to recover some bad sectors on my hard drive. When my Windows partition crashed some weeks ago, I picked up a few hard drive sectors that were marked as bad. I did not lose any important data although a Windows Dr Watson log file almost filled my 190gig hard drive partition until I deleted it. The bad sectors were a minor annoyance as they generated error messages during image backups etc. I looked for a hard drive utility that would not screw up my Suse Linux partition but recover the bad sectors and save me formating the Windows partition and then restoring the data to it from an image file. In the end, I used SpinRite from Gibson Research Corporation. It is operating system neutral because it works at the hardware level and can work with almost any file system. I was a little concerned because my Suse partition is XFS instead of ReiserFS but the utility running from a floppy did its job and did not mess up anything on the hard drive. Pros - effective and safe - operating system neutral - many choices of the level of intervention Cons - expensive $90 US - slow because it turns off virtually all hardware acceleration while working - finds IDE, SATA and USB drives easily but does not immediately see firewire drives If you run it on level 5, full sector recovery and the deepest operation level, start it up, go out for a movie and a long dinner and it should just about be finished when you get back. Plan on 4 to 6 hours. They have a good reputation for data recovery in the event of hard disk crashes and you can use the program for preventative maintenance. 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
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 -- 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
On 02/06/06, Leendert Meyer
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
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. -- Regards, Rajko. -- 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
On Fri, 2006-06-02 at 22:48 -0500, Rajko M wrote:
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.
"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" Also bootable seems to have improved a lot. BTW www.grc.com comes up much faster. Your right about the price. -- ___ _ _ _ ____ _ _ _ | | | | [__ | | | |___ |_|_| ___] | \/ -- 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
On Sun, 11 Jun 2006 16:14:16 +0200 (CEST), you wrote:
-----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
Spinrite goes way WAY beyond that - I've been using it since version 2 on a PerStor controller. It can actually (usually) recover data from a block that went bad after you wrote to it, and a whole lot more. Read the grc website. Anyone that uses disk systems seriously should have a copy of spinrite in their toolkit. Mike- -- If you're not confused, you're not trying hard enough. -- Please note - Due to the intense volume of spam, we have installed site-wide spam filters at catherders.com. If email from you bounces, try non-HTML, non-encoded, non-attachments, -- 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
participants (7)
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Carl William Spitzer IV
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Carlos E. R.
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Kevanf1
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Leendert Meyer
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Michael W Cocke
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Rajko M
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Ralph Ellis