Archived from groups: comp. Mugen Characters Blazblue Characters. sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage () My experience with Spinrite 5.0 and failing HD/floppies. (I have no grudge to bear, purpose of post is payback for good info gotten here; represents one user's experience, but is also meant to counteract all the Sprinrite hype) I had a 3 gig hd with about 5-10% bad sectors. Other HD recovery programs stalled or would take forever to scan disk. I had already recovered using simple xcopy most of the hd's data, with guestimate of 5% of files that gave read errors. After a review of most of the DR software out there, I chose not to clone with dispatch due to it's long processing time, already recovered most data and DP had no special recovery capabilities other than skipping bad sectors.
Serial key for SpinRite 5.0 can be found and viewed here. We have the largest serial numbers data base. SpinRite is a disk maintenance utility. Its main use is with hard drives, but it can also be used with floppies and removable media such as Jaz and Zip drives. Spinrite 5.0 Spinrite, by Gibson Research, is a tool that can diagnose, repair, and rejuvenate the low-level formatting and optimize the interleave of MFM and RLL (ST412/506 interface) hard disk drives.
Hiren Boot Cd Iso. Tried Drive Rescue; pcirecovery-both stalled. Get Data Back gave 24 hour estimate- extremely slow in dealing with bad sectors.
Since I had pretty much nothing to lose, I tried Sprinrite 5.0, which I got for free. First I tried it on several floppies.
Out of about 10 floppies I was able to get the data back on about 6. Eee Pc Windows Xp Lite. One floppy was made totally unusable by SR-system would not even recognize floppy was in drive. 3 others scrambled data so bad, no sense could be made of it-so much for it's statistical processing of bad sectors, ha. Most of the floppies, even those that I was able to recover data from, went belly up after trying to use them first time.
But about 60%, at least I got the data. On the hard drive, totally different story. SR started going fairly rapidly on the first portion (first 5% of drive) which, according to the program contained no bad sectors. It got increasingly slower and slower, with estimated finish times increasing steadily from 9 hours to 36 hours,when it then froze up (locked up my system) and I had to reboot. The drive was toast after using SR 5.0 to 'recover' the data. This drive could have been on the verge of dieing anyways, who is to say. Conclusion: xcopy data off failing drives, then clone if important data still remains.