spinrite in A Sentence

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    Spinrite found and fixed those errors on disk.

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    In the end, we purchased and ran Spinrite.

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    3

    Spinrite and HDD Regnerator(a similar product) have very limited uses.

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    4

    By the way, Spinrite is helping me recover a hard drive.

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    5

    In any case, you don't need Spinrite to do this cycle.

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    Then run Spinrite, copy the data again, and see what's changed, if anything.

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    7

    All Spinrite did was access the bad sector, it didn't actually repair anything.

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    8

    Spinrite has recovered a drive for me when all other tools have failed.

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    9

    Finally we purchased Spinrite after trying ChkDsk and the manufacturer's simple utility programs.

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    10

    Spinrite was a great program in the era it was written, a long time ago.

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    11

    Steve's documentation discusses a lot of hypothetical problems that Spinrite theoretically could help with.

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    12

    Thus it's always a good idea to try using dd or chkdsk before trying Spinrite.

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    13

    I have had a reasonably good experience with Spinrite, but I think it's highly overrated.

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    14

    Also Spinrite has gotten drives to recognize that I couldn't run smartmontools against, because it"wasn't there".

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    15

    But when you run Spinrite, you have to accept that the data recovered may only be partially correct.

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    16

    Spinrite also has the effect of mapping out all bad blocks, which can make the drive usable again.

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    17

    Also, and Spinrite does not work"non-destructively"-- that is, it remaps bad sectors after reading them, which can affect future recovery efforts.

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    18

    I don't have any real(i.e. professional) experience with Steve Gibson's Spinrite so I would like to put this to the SF community.

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    19

    GRC claims that Spinrite"freshens" disks by"forcing" sector remapping, which is technically true, but so does any command that reads the entire disk.

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    20

    Also, getting the information into the SMART logs helps if you need to RMA the drive as defective, something Spinrite doesn't help you with.

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    21

    The idea that Spinrite knows more about the drive than the interface provided by SMART and the manufacturer tools is at least ten years obsolete.

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    22

    Therefore, if you want to attempt a software-based recovery, you should dump what you can using tools like ddrescue, and then use Spinrite on the drive.

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    23

    I don't think Spinrite is as indispensible in 2010 as 1999, but"worthless", I don't think so, I have recovered too many drives with it, with very minimal effort.

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    24

    All I know is that Spinrite is a very old product and the fact that it's at version 6 seems to suggest that it didn't have many updates.

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    25

    As of this writing, Steve is working on version 7 of Spinrite which will include data recovery similar to dd_rescue as well as the sector recovery stuff he does now.

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    26

    Modern drives do complicated sector mapping and testing on their own, and Spinrite is way too old to know how to trigger those correctly on all the drives out there.

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    27

    What Spinrite will do that most other programs don't is to do thousands of rereads and reseeks to see if it can get the disk to read the data successfully one time.

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    28

    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.

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    29

    One important point still missing here is that Spinrite is written by Steve Gibson- a man who has been criticized for incompetence for years and has run countless attacks on windmills during his late"career".

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    30

    If you still want to run Spinrite, I would highly recommend doing it AFTER you have 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.

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