@alchemy:


See my earlier comments about the consequences of starting with a pre-conceived plan, and then expecting people to tell you why that won't work. That puts off some people (including me) due to any subsequent discussion likely being a waste of time, especially if someone has already decided on a (wrong) plan, and isn't accepting being told that from multiple replies. IMHO, from my experiences here, a different initial approach would likely have caused different responses.


See above again - same answer (as is being confirmed here!) about any replies likely being a waste of time, so what's the point in giving explanations which will then be ignored (or where there are unreasonable expectations of yet further explanation) but no, they are not the same. I suggest you go to wherever you read about, or were told that, live PCB swap as a suitable approach for your issue, and ask them to spend time explaining it. I give up

@ShellGameBot:

Unfortunately, all your suggestions won't almost certainly work, for a drive in this state:


I don't expect you to agree, but IMHO suggesting the use of SpinRite is bordering on irresponsible

Thank you, I'll look into that stuff. I also need to look into a program someday that saves anything you type in message boxes because I lost the rest of what I typed when I clicked submit. Twice now its done that.

well, as of now I have plenty of time because it's just going to sit here for the most part til I decide what to do. Apparently I cant even find someone locally to solder the dam chip to prove it wont work that way either. I just took it where they supposedly knew exactly what I was talking about, what a waste, what a nitwit. You woudln't believe the stories I get from electronics people around here that can't even solder.

I do that to save time. Maybe you do speak for the majoity in that, I don't know. I'm too old to change that and Ive been very sucessful doing that in other things and when someone does that to me in my field and they are so far off it's laughable I love to teach them.

It's not a program. In Windows, it is done like this:

1. Put cursor inside text box with hard-earned thoughts.
2. CTRL-A
3. CTRL-C
4. Hit Submit or Post or Preview, etc.

If it is blanked out and gives an error,

1. Put cursor inside text box that is now blank.
2. CTRL-V
3. Go read an introductory course on keyboard commands for Windows

Thank me.

Live swap as you call it = hot swap done with tools that can transfer the SA to the new drive and adaptive stored in the ROM and SA are needed to make this work. Without tools it will never work.

I also told you that move your ROM over to the new PCB board. Try this one that is about as far as you can go on your own without tools.

When you live swap as you call this one you have to be able to transfer the data from one drive to another to make it work. You can not do this without proper tools to work with. You can not see your SA and ROM contents to work with this and make it work for you. You have no way to swap using hot swap method to make it work.

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Iorana Haraharaini

@Vulcan:

No. Because I qualified this advice with the assumption that other processes would correct the main issue, and that SpinRite has its niche benefit for bad sectors. Don't take my word for it; read my post once again.

But you are correct, the drive that spins/clicks/spins down will not be fixed with those utilities. But he later said that he (partially) resurrected it with a PCB swap. While it is working in such a state is the point that he could try the partition utilities. We know that "Hawk" is an indication of the drive having a corrupt or incorrect ROM, but with it limping along like that, some utilities may be able to do something.

As for responsibility, I take no responsibility for giving free advice, just for following it. Neither would the developers of free software take responsibility for usage of their tools. The responsibility is taken by the one who breaks or fixes the hard drive, and so the one doing that will be due the benefit of the reward... meaning that if OP fixes it, he keeps his $$, if one of us physically do so, we charge him $$, and if he breaks it, it is his $$. I am tired of all of the disclaimers everywhere you go disclaiming responsibility for other people's actions. The only people who should claim responsibility for other people's actions are parents, custodians, employers, employees, insurers, contractors, licensors, slave owners, property owners, manufacturers, and Jesus. Most of those need to be negligent to be responsible. I am none of the above.

Show me where an anonymous adviser is responsible for his free advice, offered without malice or intent to defraud, and is liable for any problems it may cause the advisee? You would have to at least point out "bad faith" for us to approach the concept of "responsibility" as you mean it. You would at least need to point out some relationship that would imply a duty of care beyond one of "free advice." What you combat as irresponsibility does not meet the test for irresponsibility. It only meets the test of "bad free advice" or "poor free advice." And this forum has a penchant for a lot of this. The irresponsibility would apply to the folks who break stuff, most of whom put their tail between their legs, take their ball and never post again.

Perhaps you should start a sticky thread on how people should be responsible for themselves and to be cautious of bad free advice?

http://www.grc.com/files/sr5_manual.pdf

If you go to the page 7, "Before you begin" you will see that you should always backup your data before running Spinrite.

The statement, "SpinRite's proven non-destructive technology," is ridiculous. Spinrite never addresses the source of the problem and only causes extra wear on the heads which are more likely to fail before 1 bit of a file is ever copied off the drive. 99% of the time, bad sectors are forming because of failing media and/or heads.

I'm sure I have said it before, but I will say it again. If your objective is to recover data from a failing drive, you should only ever read a sector once...once it is read, it should be copied to another drive. This is best done by cloning the drive with a professional data recovery tool, like DeepSpar's Disk Imager and at the very least with an open source linux application like ddrescue.

If you ever hear someone claim to be knowledgeable in data recovery and endorse SpinRite, HDDRegen or chkdsk, they are not someone you want to trust with your valuable data.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

@ShellGameBot:

Wow - your posting really put me in my place (or not ). I politely diagree with much of it, but life is too short to spend time on a point-by-point rebuttal. If, as I expect, that makes you feel that you're "right", then we'll have to agree to disagree. At least now the readers (like alchemy) know how little responsibility you accept for advice that you give.

For the benefit of readers who may find this thread in the future:

But you didn't mention any of the risks. That's the point which any potential users need to be aware of - using SpinRite on a suspect or failing drive, is not risk-free. DR pros here frequently warn against its use before data has been recovered, due to that risk and the fact that it writes to the (failing) disk, and can therefore cause further problems.

@lcoughey:

Thanks Luke I just noticed you'd replied while I was typing my comments above.

I agree! Which is why if this was my project, and I was able to get most but not all of my data retrieved with other tools, then I would jump at the chance. Spinrite is rarely for data recovery, but there are situations, especially on older drives in my experience, that it will help. Most of the time I see it useful is when the disk works but has that continuous drive read problem in certain areas. If those areas are important, I would try Spinrite. If they are mission critical and worth thousands of dollars to me, I would not. Again, as I said before, it has a niche use for which most people coming here do not tend to have. I am guessing that the ones who have bad sectors get messages or warnings that tell them to look elsewhere.

My point here was that once the disk was readable and data had been partially recovered, that SpinRite might get the rest of it and it's cheap. You are right that its constant seeking of the drive won't help one that is about to fail or has enormous amounts of bad sectors indicative of a head or platter issue. I don't often use SpinRite for data recovery, but it sometimes works for that. It is more useful in refurbishing (so to speak) a drive that has exceeded its useful life as a main drive, but might work as a spare or backup. Not everyone can afford to toss old hard drives, even if they have begun to fill up their bad sector tables. SpinRite is more of a bandage than surgery. I have a feeling a lot of refurbishers use it and then sell drives on eBay for that reason.

Completely wrong


Completely correct.

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

[quote="ShellGameBot]Spinrite is rarely for data recovery[/quote]
Because it isn't a data recovery tool.

Let's be clear here, data is only recovered when it has been successfully copied from the bad drive to a healthy drive. At no point does SpinRite even offer to transfer data from the bad to a good, rather it copies sectors from bad drive to bad bad drive, assuming that the heads and the media are in stable condition...which they usually are not. So, would it not be wiser to clone every sector possible, skipping the few that are bad and getting 99.99% of the sectors onto another drive rather than having your drive completely crash after running SpinRite for several hours, days or weeks (we get projects that have been run for such lengths of time)? Even after running SpinRite, you still have to copy your data to another drive to consider it recovered, if you haven't killed it already.

By running SpinRite you:
1. Assume that the heads and the media are healthy
2. Assume that the translator is healthy
3. Assume that you only have a few bad sectors
4. Risk creating more bad sectors
5. Risk crashing the drive without ever copying one sector of data from the drive
6. Risk losing critical information that was once contained in a sector that is now remapped...cannot undo a sector remap...this could kill a compressed file or a database
7. Waste a lot of uncessary time
8. Decrease the odds of a successful recovery by a pro
9. Increase the cost of a successful recovery by a pro

If you are proactive and install SpinRite on your system before you have issues, it can be helpful to warn you when an issues comes into play. But, if you keep a good solid backup, it really won't matter anyway.

_________________
Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

great info.
I'm on hold for a while. I may be practicing some programs. I played with about 5-8 programs a couple days ago on a practice drive which I made unallocated. I'm sure it will be a laugh but I liked "recover my files" best, probably because it does what it's supposed to do (which probably isnt enough) and it's made for a kindergardner. Easeus runs too long and the files are more abstract to choose from. r-studio, may have been ok but I didnt give it a full chance and study its features well. I cant figure how to download mhdd. DD rescue, I dont remember what happened with me on that.
Also, I've never used Linux. Its free, is that right? Be nice to have it as a second OS on another partition if nothing else. Can that be done? Thats what Ive tried but I can't set it up. It keeps saying put disk in HD1 ????

Was the Linux idea completely off the topic of recovery or hard disk tinkering? I am assuming you want to mess with your test system...

Incidentally, one of my favorite programs for cloning is called copywipe (DOS/Windows), and gparted(Linux) has saved me a few times. I would learn those programs if I were you and not Linux.

Anyway, don't install Linux on anything. Unplug all vital hard drives from your test system and just boot to one of the many "Linux Live" CD's out there. You just download the ISO file, burn it to a CD on a Windows PC or Mac, then stick it in the CD drive of the machine you want to test it on and make it boot. On the Hiren's BootCD, it only boots to Linux when you select "Gparted" (the rest is DOS/Windows apps) I don't use Linux myself much, but I run a FreeBSD box or two... not for the feint of heart when you get the black screen and blinking cursor. I don't think learning about commandline Linux at this point will be too exciting if you are still trying to learn about how partitions and recoveries work. So try Linux with a graphical interface. But unfortunately, most of the really potent hard disk programs are run with arcane commands (dd) or with non-graphical interfaces (like slice editors).

yes, I thought linux was required for some of the DR programs but also it would be nice to have a second OS

If you examine the screenshots on the SpinRite web site, you will see that the largest capacity drive is around 200MB. That's megabytes, not gigabytes.

http://www.grc.com/srscreens.htm

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

http://www.grc.com/sr/faq.htm
They insist here that it works pretty good on modern drives too. Based on experience, this is NOT true. Or, OK, to be fair, it depends, but as a rule, if you care about data, it should be avoided.

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http://www.northwind.gr
SandForce SSD Recovery
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