- #How to make spinrite 6 work on larger drives how to
- #How to make spinrite 6 work on larger drives zip
- #How to make spinrite 6 work on larger drives download
- #How to make spinrite 6 work on larger drives free
It would be well within the capabilities of an average script programmer to write a Python, Perl, or UNIX shell script that includes all of SpinRite's documented features.
#How to make spinrite 6 work on larger drives zip
(At least, with hard disks-maybe Zip disks and such were more susceptible to data fading.) If Steve cited papers on the subjects, or if these techniques had been experimentally proven to be effective, then I would expect for there to be many open-source or commercially-available SpinRite clones. Logically, these things make sense, but I think they are just solutions to academic problems which may not actually arise in the real world.
For example: data fading away over time and needing to be "refreshed" by reading every block and writing it back to the disk again, or the notion that repeatedly repositioning the read head on either side of a block will eventually permit you to statistically divine the original data stored in that block. Steve's documentation discusses a lot of hypothetical problems that SpinRite theoretically could help with. IDE drives usually are called /dev/hd#, and SCSI (and often SATA) drives are /dev/sd#.īy the way, even though dd and badblocks are Linux programs, you can use them on NTFS drives, and you can even mount NTFS partitions in Linux, regardless of whether you're using MBR partitions, dynamic disks, or GPT disks. In-use drives (read-only test): badblocks -vs /dev/sd# Note that you need to run badblocks as root, or prefix the commands with "sudo " if you're booting off an Ubuntu live CD.īrand-new drives (warning: destroys all data!): badblocks -wvs /dev/sd# We've had at least 2 brand-new drives come with defects, and 3 or 4 more die within a couple of months (even though we did thorough tests before putting them into service). You should also periodically check your drives for degradation. If you still want to run SpinRite, I'd highly recommend doing it AFTER you've copied all existing data off the drive, just in case running the drive for a longer period of time allows it to become further degraded.Įvery time you get a new drive, you should boot off a Linux CD and run badblocks to check it for defects.
#How to make spinrite 6 work on larger drives download
Or go the slightly easier route and just download dd_rescue:
#How to make spinrite 6 work on larger drives how to
If you've got an hour or so to spare, I'd say it's worth your time to learn how to use dd instead of buying SpinRite: You can tell it to copy all the good data off the drive, then you can run it a few more times to go and try harder (i.e., use smaller block sizes) trying to pull data off the bad areas. We've had to recover other data recently, and dd has done a great job. Personally, I'd rather get the data off the disk as quickly as possible, make several backup images, and try to repair the files offline. It wouldn't surprise me if the disk degraded even further while SpinRite was running. There's something to be said for not running a dying disk for an entire month, as it's dying! Physical defects seem to have a habit of spreading. However, despite the fact that it worked, I don't know if it helped any more than just booting off a Linux CD and running dd to copy the entire drive to a file. SpinRite also made the drive mountable again. (In SpinRite's defense, it can scan a drive in just a few hours if there are no physical defects.) SpinRite was eventually able to recover all our files, although many of the larger ones turned out to be corrupt anyway. Again, it ran nonstop for more than a month trying to recover data from a defective 200 GB drive. Every time it hit a bad cluster, it spent hours trying to recover data from it. In the end, we purchased and ran SpinRite.which continued to run for more than 1 month. When the drive died, we couldn't get it to mount, no matter how many times we ran chkdsk or other tools. This was supposed to be the "shared" drive on which people just dumped stuff temporarily, but it ended up turning into a huge data repository that had miscellaneous backups, as well as a bunch of files that nobody bothered to back up anywhere. We had a 200 GB NTFS drive that suddenly failed catastrophically.
#How to make spinrite 6 work on larger drives free
There are free solutions which work just as well (actually, the free ones might work even better). In fact, it might just be too clever for its own good.
I've had a reasonably good experience with SpinRite, but I think it's highly overrated.
0 kommentar(er)
