[ale] Possibly bad hard drive

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

Wrong, sort of.  I am a Spinrite user and have had good results in recovering data on a few occasions.  It is a valuable tool and has data recovery capabilities that nothing else I'm aware of does.  HOWEVER, you have to use it the right way.  I'm away from my desk right now and will write up a detailed description of how to use Spinrite properly when I get back.

Spinrite can often recover sectors which are unreadable sectors which other products cannot.  There are literally thousands of accounts where Spinrite has recovered unusable drives enough where they were either usable or they were at least where the data could be recovered.

I will agree that you should first try to recover the readable sectors and save them away.  Use dd-rescue, or GNU dd-rescue or something else.

http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

You may wish to google dd rescue.  I know I've read that there are more advanced alternatives than the original dd-rescue.

Use one of these to read the readable sectors.  Save that data on a different hard drive.

THEN, use Spinrite to potentially read the sectors that the rescue program could not.  At this point, you have nothing to lose, since you've recovered what you can and what remains is, by definition, not recoverable by the rescue program.

One potential disadvantage of using dd-rescue first is that it could force the HDD to spare out sectors that are not easily readable.  Once that's done, even Spinrite won't be able to touch them.  I don't know specifically how to prevent that behavior from the drive.  But, I know that Spinrite prevents sector sparing until it has finished its data recovery analysis.

I hope to write up a more detailed explanation of how to use Spinrite later today.

Sincerely,

Ron




dev null zero two <dev.null.02 at gmail.com> wrote:

>you definitely shouldn't give spinrite a try if you value your data.
>recovering data BACK ONTO DAMAGED MEDIA is the number 1 no-no in data
>recovery. just buy a new drive and ddrescue your data to it.
>
>
>On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 11:43 AM, Scott Plante
><splante at insightsys.com>wrote:
>
>> You should definitely give Spinrite a try. Watch the video for a
>detailed
>> explanation of how it works.
>> http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
>>
>> ------------------------------
>> *From: *"Jonathan Meek" <jonathan.l.meek at gmail.com>
>> *To: *"Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts" <ale at ale.org>
>> *Sent: *Thursday, February 21, 2013 8:31:33 AM
>> *Subject: *[ale]  Possibly bad hard drive
>>
>>
>> Hey guys,
>>
>> I believe my hard drive is about to give up the ghost hard. Saturday
>the
>> system booted without issue then Monday, I booted the system and
>tried to
>> start Firefox. The taskbar freaked out and I had to do a hard
>shutdown.
>> After multiple restarts I was able to get the system back up but at
>all the
>> restarts, I got a error message that stated that it couldn't find a
>> particular directory and to press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart the system.
>>
>> Finally I got the system to give the prompt for entering in my
>harddrive
>> password (I have an encrypted hard disk that I setup when I did a
>fresh
>> install of lubuntu last time). It checked for errors and found some,
>it
>> tried to repair them and hung at mounting /tmp.
>>
>> I restarted the system and this time it rebooted without issue I got
>all
>> the way to the home screen and logged in. Launched Firefox without
>issue
>> and goofed around for a few minutes while I let my backup system
>backup for
>> the final time (in fear of never getting it back).
>>
>> Shutdown the system and restarted it with a Ubuntu 12.04 live CD in
>order
>> to do check the hard drive. Went into Disk Utility and the system
>> recognized I had a hard drive but when I tried any of the benchmarks
>it
>> balked at me saying it couldn't read as well as the SMART Status said
>"not
>> applicable". This might be from the encryption but I don't know.
>>
>> Exited out of the live CD, boot the system again, and it booted
>without
>> incident. Tried to do software update, it griped at me saying that
>there
>> was not enough room in /boot to do an update and to use sudo apt-get
>clean.
>> Run sudo apt-get clean and tried the update again. Same error
>message.
>> Repeated this step 5 times before giving up.
>>
>> I am not sure what to do at this stage with it because I can't seem
>to
>> wipe the drive probably due to the encryption because I tried to
>install
>> Ubuntu 12.04 since I had a backup of all my data.
>>
>> All that backstory was to ask this one question: Is there anything
>else I
>> can do to give some level of assurance the actual status of the hard
>drive?
>> I think it is busted but I am not sure.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Jonathan
>>
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>>
>
>
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--

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Ron Frazier
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