Anyone have any luck with Spinrite?

[dibbt]

I know Spinrite doesn't claim fix all hard drive issues, I used it years ago with good results, but the last two hard drives I used it on it didn't do any good.

Could have just been two really bad drives, just wondering if you've had better luck with it.

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[kjv1611]

I've heard good things about it, but never seemed to help anything I tried it on.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[JimInKS]

I have had it help on one or two systems, but that was quite awhile ago.

In at least one case the registry or some critical system file got hosed and Windows would blue screen on boot up. Spinwrite did something, I'm not sure it actually fixed the file, but whatever it did caused windows to use the backup file which was still ok.

I think on that system after the second hard drive started acting up, I replaced the mother board and hard drive.

I also use it occasionally to test a drive for bad blocks as it does seem to do a thorough job of that.

 

[G0AOZ]

Yes, I've had some success using Spinrite. One disk I was trying a recovery on, simply hung the booting of Windows XP, when it was attached as a secondary drive. Running Spinrite on it for 3 months seemed to repair it enough to go on to run another form of recovery.

You have to be very patient if it's a big disk and it's in bad shape. The disk belonged to a farmer who had his life's work on it, pictures, crop yields, and you name it! And as you've already guessed, NO BACKUP ANYWHERE!

I've read that Spinrite will try upto 2000 times to read a data block on a damaged area of the disk. The head position is moved microscopically each time in an effort to pull off the data.

Good luck.

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[kjv1611]

Man, that IS patient! I don't think I've left any machine in my house running for 3 months strait, period... well, maybe, but if I did, it was really rare. And definitely not working on one hard drive! Wow!

But if it's his life work, etc, then I suppose it'd be worth it. Then again, if it was that important, maybe he should have gone with one of the data recovery firms to be sure, pay the $300 or whatever, and gotten it back much quicker, without running up your power bill.

Either way, sounds like it had a happy ending.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[G0AOZ]

Yes it was a very long time... Spinrite doesn't need to run through Windows, so I had the drive attached to a little old 486 machine running under the bench through a UPS. Every now and again I'd plug a monitor in to see how it was cooking. In fact Spinrite, if I recall correctly, told me the whole disk would have taken about 18 months to run right through! You can in fact stop Spinrite at a specific point and then restart it again later on at that point. It had repaired enough at 3 months to save maybe 90% of his data. Once all the data was copied onto a fresh XP installation, I had to run repairs on many of the Word and Excel documents, most of his JPG photos, and also recovered/repaired 40 out of 41 of his Outlook Express mailbox folders. As a side issue, I managed to repair a crop yield programme which used a floppy disk to activate (with a licence number) a CD installation, which the supplier declined to help with. I thought it pretty poor that since the guy had paid several hundred £££ for the programme, they'd not help him, only sell him another licence.

ROGER - G0AOZ.