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spinrite is used to analyse/test working hard drives.. not used to fix borken ones. in this case it wont even help him.
– Piotr Kula
Commented Jan 4, 2012 at 10:36
@ppumkin - If the hardware is bad, you are right, there is nothing that can be done by a local user. If the drive can read the platter, Spinrite will do a sector by sector read of the data and try to recover it. It's a last ditch effort before you either call in an expensive data recovery export or give up and trash the drive.
– Doltknuckle
Commented Jan 6, 2012 at 19:21
@ppumkin - So what do you suggest? Your comment above talks about going to hddguru which is mainly a collection of free software drive utilities. If there is a mechanical or electrical problem, you don't want to use anything on that site because it may cause a bad drive to fail. The only thing I think would be useful is the scenario you mention is the Raw Copy Tool. It will copy of the contents of the platter to a working drive so you can then use other software titles to re construct your data.
– Doltknuckle
Commented Jan 6, 2012 at 20:32
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@Doitknuckle - Sorry i meant the HDDGuru Forums. There are many professionals there form all over the world. Ye- spinrite it only good to refresh sectors on a non failing, or not suspected to fail drive. Rendering spinrite useless, because who refreshed sectors now a days? In my whole career of recovering data never did once spinrite manage to accomplish anything worth talking about. If it is software related, spinrite wont fix it, if its hardware, spinrite wont fix it, and this forum is not for data recovery, hdd guru forum is. And if the disk is unmountable.. how will spinrite help?
– Piotr Kula
Commented Jan 6, 2012 at 20:54
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Well I am glad you can asses that situation, because many times .. I got hard drives that were rammed to death with spinrite and had to replace heads.. when a simple PIO mode with CRC disabled will get the data back within hours/days and the HDD will still live to tell another story. Did not mean to offend you.. I just dont like spinrite.
– Piotr Kula
Commented Jan 6, 2012 at 23:34

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