Pat and Jason,
Spin-Rite has several levels of test/recovery. The first is a read-only
scan and verification test. It is completely non-destructive but will
tell you how many errors there are. The second will try to recover
unreadable data. Higher numbers do more function with the highest level
being the most preventative.
The whole recovery process depends, of course, on the importance of the
data and your budget for recovering it. The last time a drive failed on
my desktop system (before I saw Spin-Rite), estimates started at $1000
and went up from there. Time estimates started at a week and went up
from there. If you go to Google and search for "data recovery service"
you will get a lot of good candidates.
Finally, from a "lessons learned" perspective, you will probably be more
diligent about backup after this. There are various on-line backup tools
for this and there has been some discussion on this list lately. For the
moment, I use a service from http://www.ibackup.com for my critical
files (not particularly valuable to other people, but hard to recreate
if lost). Every morning about 2:30, the client agent wakes up and sends
a copy of all the files that are changed up to the service. They have
their own client for Windows and use rsync for Linux. I sleep a lot
easier at night now. I have no business interest in ibackup other than
as a satisfied customer.
Reid Sayre
Pat Regan wrote:
Reid Sayre wrote:
Jason,
Try Spin-Rite at http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm . For $89 it's tough
to beat, and you may be able to get your data off your drive today or
tomorrow unless it's totally trashed.
I have never used Spinrite, although I have heard of it. I just skimmed
the website a little bit, though. If it only does what I read about in
the FAQ it is probably a very bad idea to run it on a failing drive.
The FAQ seemed to claim that it does a read/write/read/write cycle
across the whole disk. If you do this on a drive that is failing badly
enough to be making a lot of noise you will make it very, very hard to
ever recover the data afterwards.
It sounds more likely that Spinrite is meant to be used as preventative
maintenance (the FAQ recommends running it every few months). I can
understand why that may be a good idea, and I am terribly surprised that
there isn't a open source alternative. There is no reason something
like this can't be done on a live file system, at least in theory :).
The reason the read/write/read/write helps is because IDE drives only
remap bad sectors during a write. In other words, if you keep hitting a
particular bad sector during a read the data will be kept in the same
place on the disk. If you attempt to write to that same sector and it
fails, that sector will be remapped to another unused portion of the disk.
If you continually get write errors the drive is already pretty bad. It
pretty much means that you have run out of unmapped sectors for it to
remap to.
Did I misread the Spinrite page?
Pat
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