Metrogirl Posted November 11, 2006 Share Posted November 11, 2006 We've had several threads about recovering dead and dying Windows hard drives (usually Maxtors), and I've added my thoughts to some of them. My favourite trick of putting a dying drive in the freezer for 24 hours (in a sealed zip-top plastic bag) has helped a few folks get data back when all else has failed. However this week I had occasion to try a utility called Spinrite to recover some data on an otherwise totally screwed drive (yes, a Maxtor) and was amazed at the results. Some years ago I used an old version of Spinrite and wasn't terribly impressed; it sort of recovered some data but I was left feeling that it probably stuffed other data which would have been better left alone. I forgot about it. Now things have certainly changed. I was sent a disk belonging to a colleague containing some 'vital' business data which had been written after the last weekly backup, and he needed to get it back. The drive was an XP boot drive, 300GB SATA-300, and it just thrashed and clunked when he tried to boot the system. Mounting it on another system reported it as unreadable. I'm sort of the technical resource in my area (I do forensic analysis and similar stuff for the company) so I was the last resort to help him out. I asked on our internal technical forum at work if anyone had a low-level recovery utility and someone sent me Spinrite 6.0. I won't bore you with the details, but after a few hours the drive was not only working properly once more, with all data intact, but it's gone on working perfectly ever since. I'm amazed, delighted, and absolutely recommend it to anyone who needs to get data back or just refresh a disk which is sometimes a bit sluggish. It can test, condition, re-write and re-map a drive at very low levels of operation and I plan to use it regularly just to keep my drives in good nick. I was so impressed I bought my own copy (with the company's money, lol). Spinrite's home page is HERE and there's an excellent review of it HERE . You can download it from various pirate sources, though it's hard to find because each copy is personalised, but I really hope that if you want to use it, you'll buy it. It's not expensive ($89), upgrades are actually ridiculously cheap, and for less than the cost of a smallish hard drive you can recover and repair as many disks as you want. Check it out, if you have a problem drive, you won't be disappointed. No, I'm not getting commission from Spinrite - but a great product deserves mention here, particularly as it will probably help a few of you. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/32923-spinrite/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnniecarcinogen Posted November 12, 2006 Share Posted November 12, 2006 I can personally vouch for Spinrite. I think anyone that works with computers and may need to recover data on a hd one day should have this. I also respect Steve Gibson and enjoy his podcast with Leo Laporte 'Security Now'. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/32923-spinrite/#findComment-231975 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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