[ale] Possibly bad hard drive

[dev null zero two]

if spin rite works for you, great, but I can't endorse a product that after
7 years still recovers data back onto the damaged media. literally the
number 1 no-no in data recovery.

Sent from my mobile. Please excuse the brevity, spelling, and punctuation.
On Feb 21, 2013 5:45 PM, "Ron Frazier (ALE)" <
atllinuxenthinfo at techstarship.com> wrote:

> **
> By the way, dev null, why don't you post your name to your messages?
>
> Anyway ... SIGH.  What I'm about to say is not meant to offend ...
> really.  However, almost everything you've said about Spinrite or Steve
> Gibson or GRC is wrong, so I'm going to address it.  I don't have any
> financial incentive to promote Spinrite.  I am a happy customer and hope
> others can use it to help recover data.  I would gladly buy the product
> again.  Comments inline.
>
> On 2/21/2013 1:55 PM, dev null zero two wrote:
>
>  Disclaimer: I used to do professional data recovery (clean room, head
> and platter extractions and replacements, board rebuilds, RAID rebuilds,
> etc) working for Scott Moulton.
>
>
> I'm sure you were very knowledgeable and professional in your prior
> duties.  However, you don't have extensive knowledge of or experience with
> Spinrite.  I do.  I probably know more about it than anyone else on this
> forum, not from a coding perspective, but from a user perspective.  I have
> used the product a number of times for personal data recovery.  I have had
> SUCCESS with using it several times for personal data recovery.  I have
> listened to every one of Steve Gibson's 391 podcasts, and when the topic of
> hard drive maintenance comes up, I listen carefully.  I have read much of
> the (admittedly somewhat dated) information he has about it online.
>
>  Spinrite is no better than ddrescue (ddrescue, NOT dd_rescue, which is
> much older and shittier). They both try and read sectors in reverse, in PIO
> mode, coming from different sections of drive, retrying multiple times,
> etc. But it's only as good as the ATA controller itself and the firmware
> controlling it - which is to say, not that great. that's why devices like
> the Deepspar Disk Imager exist: they have custom controllers DESIGNED for
> failing drives (timeouts can be changed, long reads can be used, read
> aheads can be turned off, you can read sectors ignoring ECC, etc etc).
>
>
> This is wrong.  Spinrite has far more advanced capabilities than ddrescue
> (based on my reading).  Spinrite will try to read a faulty sector up to
> 2000 times, and sometimes will spend days or weeks doing so.  This is far
> more than any other utility I'm aware of.  It is also far more than the OS
> will generally try.  He does try to read the sector from many different
> starting positions, as you alluded to, but Spinrite does this in a much
> more exhaustive manner, as far as I know.  Because the drive is a
> mechanical device, with wear and tear, minute variations in the head
> alignment when they come to a stop make small differences in the heads
> ability to read the sector.  Sometimes, this is enough to get a good read
> from the sector and fully recover all the data immediately.  If so, it is
> relocated to a safe place.
>
> IN ADDITION, Spinrite keeps in memory all the raw data that it has read on
> each of those 2000 attempts.  If a good read cannot be achieved during the
> 2000 attempts, Spinrite performs an exhaustive statistical analysis of
> those 2000 copies of the various sector reads and tries to extrapolate the
> most likely contents of the 512 bytes (or 4KB) of the sector.  It is thus
> able to sometimes recover the whole sector, and sometimes able to recover a
> PARTIAL sector.  However, that data is frequently enough to make the OS
> happy trying to read the file allocation table, or the user application
> happy trying to read the meta data of a document, etc.  If it works, it
> thus, it makes the drive usable, or at least more usable, where it wasn't
> before.
>
> By the way, regarding specialized machines and controllers, this
> discussion is not about what a data recovery professional with a
> specialized lab can do with a drive.  It's about what a consumer with
> minimal to above average technical abilities can do with it in the field
> with little or no outside help.
>
>
> "One potential disadvantage of using dd-rescue first is that it could
> force the HDD to spare out sectors that are not easily readable" Sector
> remapping is done at the firmware level, Spinrite can't prevent it,
> ddrescue can't prevent it, no software tool can prevent it (except for
> maybe MHDD on certain Seagates if you have the firmware commands). you need
> something lower level that can disable sector remaps at the firmware level
> temporarily while you image the drive.
>
>
> This is also wrong.  Spinrite has been preventing sector remapping since
> LONG ago, as a prelude to its data recovery work.  See the following link:
>
> http://www.grc.com/srrecovery.htm
>
> quote ->
>
> The FIRST THING SpinRite does when it starts examining and working with a
> drive is to completely disable the drive's built-in automatic sector
> relocation. This way the drive can't whisk the sector away the first time
> it's not easily read, and SpinRite can study the sector to recover its data
> as much as necessary. (And as you might guess by now, no other utility is
> even aware of this problem.)
>
> <-- end quote
>
> ddrescue probably cannot do this, as you said, but Spinrite can and does.
> One reason that this is possible is that, when Spinrite is running, it's
> the only thing running (on top of FreeDos).  It has exclusive control of
> the machine and the controller.  When ddrescue is running, it is limited in
> what it can do by what the OS will allow, even if running as super user.
>
> For this reason alone, if I didn't think a drive had mechanical problems,
> only soft errors, I would probably be inclined to use Spinrite on it before
> trying something like ddrescue.  If I thought an exhaustive data analysis
> might make the drive worse, I might go the other way.
>
>  The reason Spinrite sucks is that it recovers data back onto the drive
> itself
>
>
> Wrong.  First, the statement is inherently biased.  Second, Spinrite is
> targeted to average to above average consumers, but not uber geeks.  It is
> meant to help people which overwhelmingly (percentage wise) are Windows
> users, who know little or nothing about Linux, who probably wouldn't know
> (at least in the past) how to install a backup drive, and who don't really
> have access to any viable alternative to recover unreadable data.  Oh, and
> like most consumers, they probably don't have a backup.  In this context,
> restoring to the original drive, but back on to good sectors, is the only
> viable option for many of the target audience.  Having said that, it would
> be cool if a later version offered data saving to a different drive for the
> more advanced users.
>
>  and is marketed as a magic bullet
>
>
> Wrong.  Steve has never marketed the product this way in the 7 years I've
> been listening to the podcast.  He markets it as a potential way to recover
> otherwise unrecoverable and unusable hard drives which have soft failures
> (as opposed to the heads melting).  He never says it always works, but says
> that it does work in many cases.  And all that is exactly true.  The fact
> is, that this product has helped thousands of users, including myself,
> recover data and drives that they probably would have had to sacrifice
> otherwise.
>
>  for data recovery, when in fact, it's incredibly disingenuous to sell a
> tool that breaks the number one rule of all data recovery.
>
>
> Wrong.  See discussion above about the logic of recovery in place.
>
>  Spinrite can do nothing that ddrescue can't do, and in fact, ddrescue is
> a bit more robust as far as error recovery and granularity goes, plus it
> actually gives you a usable dd image.
>
>
> Wrong again.  Spinrite does far more than ddrescue is capable of.  See
> discussion above.
>
>  GRC is a blowhard idiot at data recovery and at networking
>
>
> A) Wrong.  B) BIASED  C) EMOTIONAL  D) Not based on FACTS or LOGIC or
> EVIDENCE or EXPERIENCE or EXPERIMENT.
>
> and therefore it is
>
> E) IRRELEVANT
>
>  (omg raw sockets in Win XP, the sky is falling!!).
>
>
> Not relevant to this discussion.  HOWEVER, it is a FACT that, Steve was
> instrumental in persuading MS to drop raw sockets.  It is also a FACT that,
> should they have kept the feature in there, potentially millions of
> malicious users of Windows, with minimal training, minimal resources, and
> minimal difficulty, would have access to a much easier time perpetrating
> attacks on other users.
>
> Perhaps you should do a bit more FACT CHECKING before trashing someone's
> product or their reputation in public.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Ron
>
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 1:17 PM, Ron Frazier (ALE) <
> atllinuxenthinfo at techstarship.com> wrote:
>
>> 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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>>
>>
>>  --
>>
>> Sent from my Android Acer A500 tablet with bluetooth keyboard and K-9
>> Mail.
>> Please excuse my potential brevity if I'm typing on the touch screen.
>>
>> (PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
>> call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
>> mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new email messages very
>> quickly.)
>>
>> Ron Frazier
>> 770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
>> linuxdude AT techstarship.com
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ale mailing list
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>> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
>> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing listAle at ale.orghttp://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists athttp://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
>
> --
>
> (PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
> call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
> mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new email messages very quickly.)
>
> Ron Frazier770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
> linuxdude AT techstarship.com
>
>
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