Thanks for the explanation. It seems I need to educate myself some more on how hard drives and their electronics flag bad sectors independent of the file and operating system!
-----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, June 25, 2010 10:44 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: TrueCrypt On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 9:26 AM, Joe Tinney <[email protected]> wrote: > If the entire drive is encrypted how would SpinRite be able to > correctly identify the filesystem type and update the appropriate > entries when it moves data? SpinRite is not filesystem aware. All SpinRite does is read each disk block into memory (retrying if needed), repeatedly write and read test patterns to the disk block location, and then write the original data back. SpinRite does nothing for you if the disk drive has a mechanical or electronics fault, or if the drive is incapable of reading blocks from the media. Frankly, I think SpinRite is rather overrated in this day of intelligent disk electronics and freely-available utilities that do similar things. I tried it on a laptop hard disk drive that was giving media errors a few years ago, and it didn't even find anything wrong. Even MS-DOS knew there was something wrong with the disk. SpinRite may have been more useful back in the days of dumb disks and OSes, but I think it's outlived its usefulness. To GRC's credit, they did refund my money when I complained. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
