Spin Rite is it worth it

[MesaMarshall]

General Question: Is Spin Rite made by GRC worth the money?
As I understand it, Spin Rite repairs the drive so it can be either read again, or make it bootable.

Are there other vendors who make similar software anymore? I remember having an old Norton Utilities have from the early 2000's that had some disk doctor utility.
If there are alternatives please list them.

Thank you in Advance,


-Mesa

 

[goombawaho]

GetDataBack has worked for me. It gets the data, but doesn't try to fix the drive. Cheap price relative to data recovery services. Use the trial and see if you can see your data. If you can see it in GDB, it will be recoverable most likely.

 

[kjv1611]

In some dire cases, SpinRight might be worth it, but I'd be more apt to think of it like what goombawaho posted. Try recovering the data. If you can get the data off, just toss the drive. You'd not want to use a software-repaired hard drive long term anyway, as it would be more likely to fail sooner than a new drive. Plus, in relation to the value of most folks' data, hard drives are cheap.

 

[goombawaho]

Yeah - I'm never too excited to see a hard drive utility tell me "Lots of problems found, but I fixed them - so don't worry".

I still would worry. If you can get the data - get it and run with it. Right over to a new drive. Not to pile on, but this should aldo illustrate the importance of data backup.

 

[kjv1611]

Yeah - I'm never too excited to see a hard drive utility tell me "Lots of problems found, but I fixed them - so don't worry".

[ROFL2]

 

[goombawaho]

How do you do that quote thing??? I don't see a button for it anywhere.

 

[kjv1611]

Goomb,

It's listed under the "Process TGML" link to the bottom right of where you post a message.

But the code is:

[IGNORE][QUOTE]My Silly Quote[/QUOTE][/IGNORE]

Which in turn would give:

My Silly Quote

 

[MesaMarshall]

Well to be honest I am more worried about the machine's system state and applications.

A bit more background: I have a few machines that are running some PLC control software that the vendor has left / gone / company went under. And I am trying to buy our controls engineer time to find new software / new system to handle the PLC's. One machine has a flaky hard drive that is making Ghost really unhappy trying to image.

So I want to repair the drive to a point where it's ghostable, put the image on another drive, and then junk the original. (or gutman wipe it until it actually does die)


-Mesa

 

[edfair]

It is another tool.

In the days of stepper motor head positioning and heat induced cylinder movement it was the tool that saved many a customer's data.

There are still times when it might be handy. IIRC the data reads went through more tries than any other program and that led to better recovery.

Haven't used mine in years but it is still on the shelf.



Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[goombawaho]

You HAVE tried the manufacturer's utility on the hard drive to see what it says - right!!!??? That would always be my first choice. Then you can gamble (depending on what the results are) that a third party utility can "fix" the problem or help it enough to get the drive imaged.

It may be that the drive is not image-able at this point.

 

[kjv1611]

MesaMarshall,

If the drive is damaged, but you can still see the data, AND you want to keep your system state, then try mirroring the drive to a new one. THEN if you do get it mirrored to a new drive, I suppose in your case it wouldn't hurt to go ahead and mirror yet another drive from the new one.... that way if the NEW one fails, you've still got a back-up ready to go.

Or once you get it imaged/mirrored to the new drive, think about running a backup program that backs up images of the whole system. Acronis True Image, Norton Ghost, TerabyteUnlimited Images for Windows, and others.

 

[G0AOZ]

I have used SpinRite to repair a drive with XP on it sufficiently well for data recovery to take place. Under certain circumstances I found that GetDatBack could not cope with a very badly damaged drive - just reported too many errors. After running SpinRite I was able to pull off most of the required data. So FWIW, in my case it was good to have that utility in my toolbox...

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[MesaMarshall]

Goombawahoo, Yup I have run WD data lifeguard tools and it reported that it had numerous bad sectors.

Luckily during a shutdown of that part of my plant I was able to use Ghost with the -FOR option and I was able to ghost 5GB of data within 18hours.

So I was lucky this time, and I appreciate everyone's advise. I might get SpinRite just to keep it for those all hope is possibly lost situations.

Thanks to everyone.


-Mesa

 

[stduc]

I've had a great deal of success with Sprinrite in the past. Specifically on IDE drives. I have not had the same level of success with newer SATA drives however. When it works it does a great job of finding bad sectors, recovering the data that was on them, moving that data to a good sector and marking the bad sector as bad. This has allowed me to recover a failed system, clone it to a new drive and bin the failing drive. I also used it very successfully once on a laptop that suffered a power cut during boot when the battery had no charge. After that it wouldn't boot until I let Spinrite do its 'thing'. Upon which all was well.

So, I am glad I have it in my toolkit, Along with GetDataBack. Both have their uses. The trouble with most manufacturers diagnostics is they either test the drive and tell you there is a fault. Or they wipe the drive while sparing off any bad sectors. Not what you want most of the time.

[navy]When I married "Miss Right" I didn't realise her first name was 'always'. LOL[/navy]

 

[goombawaho]

I think that we are looking at two different products for different purposes that might actually be used best in conjunction.

SpinRite helps to fix the disk so it's readable.

You might then use GDB to get at that drive since it's been made readable again. Nobody should think that GDB fixes drives. It recovers your data from stupid formatting mistakes, lost partitions and just plain pressing the delete button.