Black Raven Dragoons

[Damorte]

For my daily geek moment I must share this awesome pic. I have been trying to save this hard drive for my friend using SpinRite to get the sectors repaired and recovered. I have NEVER seen a hard drive scan look like this before, nor have I ever had a scan take over 68 hours with an estimated 46 hours left to go. It is fabulous, I just had to share. Sorry about the size, no photoshop and I HATE gimp.

[Zancarius]

Oh sweet jeebus, I thought Steve Gibson's crap died in the 1990s. While I think utilities like this are cool, it's important to understand that some of SpinRite's claims are questionable:

Worse, Steve encouraged people to use SpinRite to "recover" areas that had
been detected and marked as defective at the factory, a bad idea that
leads to more failures in the long run, since end user controllers are not
as sensitive as factory test equipment -- they are simply incapable of the
kind of thorough testing done at the factory. Then of course SpinRite
would be "needed" again to "fix" those failures, a self-fulfilling
prophecy.

Anyway, I don't mean to be a total ass. It's just that the author is an idiot, and I've had some unfortunate experiences in the past where his knee-jerk alarmism has caused me no end of misery with regards to technical support.

[Damorte]

Meh, I'm not touting the software, I'm just giggling at the ridiculous results. This HDD was already toast, I'm not seriously expecting to save it. She's already bought a new one, just waiting for it to arrive so I can install it for her. We knew well before this scan it was toast, nothing this software can do would tell me otherwise.

[Zancarius]

I just dislike the guy with a burning passion, especially after his "raw sockets" FUD that he was spreading prior to the release of Windows XP. There's also an admission I've been looking for (haven't found it quite yet, but I've seen it referenced in a couple of articles) where he confesses to spreading misinformation to sell his products. Not only that, but who the hell codes large apps in x86 assembler these days unless they're clinically insane?

At this point, you don't care--but for anyone else reading the thread, let me just point out some reasons to look elsewhere if you're looking to grab some kind of recovery software:

• SpinRite is dangerous. It saves recovered data to the same disk it's recovering from. Seriously. Double-you Tee Eff.
• There are free alternatives that give you a little more control: ddrescue is a bit harder to use, but it's free. It beats sending $89 to a lunatic.
• "Low level" reading and writing is fine--but here's the problem: For at least 10 years, hard disks don't do exactly what they claim they do when asked by software. This lead to a slight write problem in FreeBSD ~4.2-4.4 until they came up with a creative solution, because it was feasible for the disks to refuse flushing data (which means writing it out physically) for an indeterminate period of time. Add to this the fact that you can't precisely control the read/write heads (despite what Gibson claims) and that read/writes won't always happen exactly when the drive tells you it's happening, and you have a slew of interesting issues. Mind you, the write issue didn't affect other OSes besides FreeBSD at the time, because they were among the few experimenting with journalling file systems. It's also feasible that the manufacturers made some minor alterations in part because of the FreeBSD crowd, but I'm not 100% sure about this. Anyway, these reasons are why data recovery firms charge so much: Depending on the problem, they often have to look for a donor disk where they will 1) remove the logic board from the donor disk and add it to the disk they're attempting to recover data from, 2) physically remove the platters from both disks and insert the platters to be recovered into the donor disk, 3) replace the read/write heads from the donor disk to the disk they're attempting to recover. (Failing that, in criminal cases, they'll sometimes scan the disk surface and assemble the data manually. I believe they might use an electron microscope but don't quote me on that.)
• The only person who's Reality Distortion Field (RDF) is stronger than Steve Gibson's is another Steve: Steve Jobs. That alone is a frightening prospect.

TL;DR: Blah blah blah. Steve Gibson is a lunatic. Blah blah.