[time-nuts] OT: Disk Drive recovery.

Mike Naruta AA8K aa8k at comcast.net
Mon Dec 7 12:01:00 UTC 2009


I bought a copy of Spinrite and it recovered
a drive that wouldn't boot.

When rebuilding my PCs, I run Spinrite on the
drives to make sure a drive is not failing.

I've used it to decide when to retire my HDs.
It's been months since I've used it, I should
probably do a preemptive run, but on large
drives it takes a long time.  The older BIOSes
sometimes can't handle a large partition.

I haven't tried "freezing" a drive.


This reminds me of the ancient Seagate
insufficient startup torque problem.  At work
I was able to unfasten the hard drive and, at
power-up, give the drive a quick physical
rotation, just enough to get it spinning and
then copy the user's data from it.  Of course,
users don't back up their files.


Mike - AA8K


Dave Baxter wrote:
> For many "failed" hard drives, it's not a "hardware" failure at all, but
> a very corrupted data surface, rendering even the drives own error



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