Hello there everyone,

First of all I would like to say that Im trying to learn more about data recovery and Im thirsting for knowledge whenever it can be found. Telling me to go to a datarecovery lab is out of the question as my goal is to learn more about how to solve logical errors myself more then what I know at this very moment. I am mostly fixing drives of my friends that has data which is isnt of great value to them and I also got few of my own which i experiment around with.

What I would like to ask you proffesional (as im sure theres quite few of them on this board), is how come so many people are against softwares such as MHDD, Spinrite and HDD Regenerator?
From my own experience they have helped every single time, Ive yet to fail with one single harddrive, and so far Ive fixed 12 Harddrives where Im not really sure what the problem was. Ive had a Maxtor HDD that sounded really bad that I got off my sister and I used HDD reg on it and managed to save everything on it until it failed totally 2 days later (But my goal was accomplished to recover the data).

I know that these recovery tools can cause more problems if the harddrives have mechanical problems since they are reading and writing to the harddrive troughout their procedures, but for harddrives with logical problem it does the job does it not?

Also, people here tend to talk a lot about reconstruction of filesystems and so on.. in almost all cases the HDD is not important the data is, and like in my own situation these tools have been enough for me to be able to retrieve data trough Windows afterwards.

I see almost on all data recovery websites that they say that 70-80% of all problems are just logical errors, so if so 70-80% of the times using these softwares should be recommended, should they not?


Thank you for reading this very first post of mine.

/wallstreet

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Greed is good..

I think you are mixing things up. You talk about solving logical disk problems, but MHDD, HDD Regen and Spinrite are programs for diagnosing/repairing media errors (physical errors). While MHDD is a more general tool and can be of great value if used with knowledge, I would never let the latter two programs "attack" a failing disk.

Accessing sectors on a HDD with detoriating media should only be done for cloning purposes. Experience and analysis will enable you to set correct parameters for the cloning process. Hopefully avoiding the patient dieing on the operating table.

When you got the patient HDD cloned, you can use logical recovery programs like R-Studio and EasyRecovery to find partitions, file systems and so on. And yes, these programs do a good job most of the time. As long as they work on the clone.

Hello Eleg, first I want to thank you for your reply.

Ok so in what cases are programs such as Spinrite and HDD Regenerator supposed to be used? On healthy drives only (because I thought spinrite cannot solve mechanical/physical problems but only logical)? If im able to image the damaged HDD onto a healthy drive then there is no risk of attacking the HDD with Spinrite and similiar tools right?

What seperates MHDD to them others 2? It surely by the sound of your reply seem to be much more gentle with the HDD (Im now assuming MHDD is not writing any data at all only read mode)

Prosoft Engineering media tools Ive just purchased few days ago and Ive still havent had time to test clone anything, I will do that tonight. But you mention experimenting with parameters, is this the best tool around or did I just buy for nothing? Is this the standard in the world of data recovery as far as software goes?


Maybe I should have checked with you guys before I Purchased it, Im not sure I could get my money bk

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Greed is good..

The real use of regen programs like Spinrite and HDD Regen? None at all I guess. You shouldn't use them on any failing drive, and there is no reason to run them on a healthy ones. I picked up a license for Spinrite some 10-15 years ago. Did successfully use it to recover data from 5,25 and 3,5 inch diskettes. Never used it on a HDD though. The main problems of the "regen" approach are stressing the failing HDD, and writing recovered data back to the same disk. Maybe this did work back in the era of very low density HDDs. Today it is not a valid approach for recovering data.

MHDD has indeed got a scan and repair function which not should be used indiscriminately. But MHDD has also got other tools which can be quite useful.

When it comes to software programs for cloning, Media Tools Pro is doing a decent job. Other software tools to look into are HD Dupl/Copyr and ddrescue. Please note that cloning programs based on only software are limited in how they handle HDD errors. Cloning a disk with lots of media errors can take considerable amounts of time, if possible at all.

An important principle for both hardware and software based cloning solutions is to only attempt repeatedly reading difficult sectors after all easily readable data has already been saved. In other words the cloning program need to address the HDD in different phases, using a log file to keep records of what's done. Increasing sector read retries for each phase.

If you browse around these forums you will find lots of information on cloning. E.g these links:
Procedures for cloning Sata and Pata hard drives
The Best Disk Cloning Hareware/Software

Eleg, once again thanks for the reply, much appreciated. But I just cannot disregard the fact that Spinrite and HDD Regenerator has been successfully fixed all my hard drives and so many of my friends too. Its like 95 vs 5%.. Disregarding that is ignorant regardless of what kind of negative impact it can have to in those remaining 5% of the cases. Trust me I understand what your saying, but do you get what I mean? If its a working tool and it supposedly is doing what it promises why not use it, as long as you sure the drive has no physical problems?

Im getting an error when trying to create my bootable :
"Failed to communicate with CD-burning engine"

Do you have ideas Eleg?

Thanks for those links!

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Greed is good..

How can you be sure of this?

In cases with logical bad sectors only, a simple zero-fill would work just as well as spinrite etc

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Well I assume there is tools to find this out, such as HDDScan or Spinrite smart scan.

Are you serious?? Spinrite tests values up till 100 times to guess the correct value.. its not just adding zeros

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Greed is good..

I am serious. You said fixed, so I took that to mean that the drive had bad sectors and didn't afterward. If you are referring to actually retrieving data from the drive then the only real issue with spinrite etc (in cases with logical problems ONLY) is that they write back to the surface of the disk they are reading from.

In other cases the problem is that they go over bad areas of the surface over and over and over again, potentially making it worse and destroying the heads.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

*Sighs*

So what other option do you have in the world of softwares?

SCENARIO :
HDD wont boot windows, nothing works, filetable corrupted and maybe even bad sectors. What will be able to fix this besides Spinrite/HDD Regenerator?
Let me guess cloning the HDD and using recovery tools to retrieve the data, is that the only "REAL" and "recommended" solution you would give me?

I dont understand how a tool thats so successful can cause so much damage, I mean I believe you and I agree but... why would a programmer that became so famous with this software permit such a operation, instead of writing it to a alternative harddrive or what have u?

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Greed is good..

Why would you want to do anything else?

Because 99.9% of people have no idea how hard drives work and what is or is not a good idea

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

I apologize, I always thought Spinrite/HDD Regenerator has been the tool all the labs uses. So I assume what I just wrote is exactly what you guys recommend. You ask why?.. I just thought software Imaging wasnt the easiest thing to do, I read a lot about the software I bought called Media Tools Pro that it sometimes takes days to backup data. ( Which im still trying to get to work, having some CD issues, u can chk the thread under this one for more information if you have time). I just put a aweful lot of money on this and now I might need to buy another burner *frustrated*

Im shocked how the whole world would bypass the correct way of doing it, and instead turn to programs such as Spinrite / HDD regenerator. Sometimes this world is a strange place..

p.s thx a lot for the help i been recieving, sorry if i came off as ignorant. Its my lack of knowledge compared to you which is to blaim.

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Greed is good..