[jayfro]

Not sure if anyone has ever used it, but one of my laptops was reporting a hard drive read failure and wouldn't boot. I put in SpinRite, and let it run... It ran for a full 182 HOURS (yep... over 1 week!!!!) It wasn't pretty, but in the end, it identified several bad sectors, recovered most of them, fixed up the data, and bang... the laptop works again! I have another hard drive I was going to just replace it with, but I decided to see what SpinRite could do when given the time. Like I said, it was painful the amount of time it took, but if you ever have data you don't want to lose (in this case I didn't care, I just wanted to see if it would go all the way through), give spinrite a try!

Jay Fro

[Jay]

hmm. if Leo likes it, I'm in.
thanx

[jayfro]

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

[Chromakey]

Just had a look at their two videos and read the testimonials - seems like it could be the thing for me.

I have a drive that just clicks and whirrs, windoze does not see it anymore and I have a shed load of stuff on it I could do with getting back - I think someone suggested putting it in the deep freeze and trying it - did that but no luck - mind you, it was difficult seeing the keyboard in there with the door closed!

Might just buy it as I have a few old drives around that I did not junk, hoping that one day a miracle might happen.......

[Skibum]

Oh Brother.... snicker snicker

[Jay]

[Chromakey]

Well, I have bought it.

I am running it on another machine right now.

I did put one disk on and it was going to take about 142 hours so will get back to you with the results!!!

Fingers crossed...................................

[Jay]

see you in 5.916666666666666666666666666667 days! Good luck

[jayfro]

I have had it fix a couple drives now that was doing the "clanking". I have also had a couple it couldn't do because the drive wasn't even being seen by the BIOS any longer.

One thing I will note, is on the laptop drive that took over a week, the "time remaining" was quite off. For about the last 5 days it only had about 6 hours to go. The problem is when you run in level 5, it doesn't know where the bad sectors are yet, nor how long it will take to fix them. Thus, take the estimated time remaining with a grain of salt!

Jay Fro

[Jay]

Like estimated disk cleanup time, etc. Yup.

[Skibum]

While you may temporarily be able to use a "repaired" drive it would be totally foolhardy. The drive has failed, and will continue to fail.... get rid of it and stop kidding yourself.

If you need to access some critical data fine, but that's it.

[Chromakey]

While you may temporarily be able to use a "repaired" drive it would be totally foolhardy. The drive has failed, and will continue to fail.... get rid of it and stop kidding yourself.

If you need to access some critical data fine, but that's it.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

That goes without saying on the drive I am trying to get working again - purely a data recovery attempt, not a bid to get drives back into everyday use.

[Jay]

Well yeah, isn't that the point, recover data and get rid of the hardware?

Or are some folks thinking this a fix?

[Skibum]

Okee Dokey.. As long as we are clear.