A good friend asked me to try to recover data off an 80 GB Maxtor drive that died. I took the drive and put in a spare box and put spinrite on a bootable CD.
It has been running for about two weeks and is about 7 percent done. The results do not appear to be encouraging and at one point I found spinrite had locked up.
Frankly, this exercise seems pointless. So I am asking for input on what else to try. The spinrite site suggests the hard drive in the freezer trick. I will try this next unless there are some other suggestions.
Thanks
Spinrite taking forever...
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Executioner
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EXEC: Spinrite does a lot more than the Windows sector scan. Sector scan will throw away ALL the data in a bad sector. Spinrite always tries to recover ALL the data in a bad sector, so yeah it takes a while.
LMANDRAKE: Depends on the condition of the drive. I have heard stories of drives running Spinrite for MONTHS and fully readable afterwards. The record so far, according to Gibson, is 6 months (and the drive was readable) but even he admits he would have given up long before that.
Me personally I will not run a drive on Spinrite more than a week unless it's extremely mission critical data and it's a business client. I do have a dedicated box for long Spinrite jobs, but I can't tie it up all the time. There's no way of knowing if it will work and I don't charge my customers unless I can recover some of the data.
First off, be aware you can stop the process any time and continue it if you need to move the drive to another PC. When you stop the process, Spinrite will give you the partition number and a percentage number to 3 decimal places of where it stopped. Write it down. You can alway run Spinrite again later and you will have an opportunity to manually select the starting point for the scan and resume where you left off.
Are you running a level 2 or level 4 scan? Since you are just trying to recover data you should be using level 2. Level 4 takes much longer, and can potential push a bad drive over the edge into oblivion due to the aggressive nature of that level's technique. If you're running level 4 you can switch to level 2 on the fly by toggling to the menu that selects the scan level. Level 4 is only for preventative maintenance on a good drive. It "refreshes" all the sectors by reading them, writing the binary data back inverted, reading it again, and writing it back normally. That strengthens the (analog) recording signal on the media, eliminates magnetic anomalies, and forces the drive's internal error correction to swap out failing sectors BEFORE they become unreadable. You never want to run level 4 on drive that's already got bad sectors. Level 2 just tries to read each sector, tries (very hard) to recover the data in any bad sectors, and swaps out bad sectors.
I'm assuming this a pretty bad drive and that nearly every sector has triggered the "Dynastat" data recovery which tries to rebuild the data in a damaged sector before allowing the drive to swap out the bad sector (otherwise your would lose all the data in that sector). During Dynastat, Spinrite tries to read the sector 2000 times using different techniques, it then reassembles the data by aggregating all the partial data reads from the 2000 passes. This takes time on a really bad drive since with timeouts I've seen it take and hour to reconstruct a really bad sector.
I assume at this stage you're just trying to salvage data (the OS is probably a lost cause anyway). One thing you can do is stop Spinrite, make a note of where it left off in case you want to resume it later, and then manually skip ahead to another part of the drive more likely to contain data. I use this technique often to save time.
For example, if this is a WinXP OS on the drive, and it's an 80Gb drive, then most of the data is most likely to be stored somewhere past the 10% mark. If it's a Vista OS then the data is likely to be somewhere past the 20% mark. Skip ahead and see if you get lucky and get past the really bad section you're in and you might be able to read most of the data.
If the drive is doing a lot of clicking and pausing (click ogf death) then it may very well be a lost cause because even if the data recovery works, the drive has mechanical issues with it's actuator and you may still not be able to get any data off of it. Matter of fact it's really not worth running Spinrite on a click of death drive since the problem likely has nothing to do with the media: it's going to be a spindle or head actuator issue, and Spinrite can't do anything about that.
It's a personal call. After doing a lot of Spinrite recoveries over the years I get a pretty good feel for whether or not I'm wasting time on a drive. If the drive has spurts where it blows through sectors quickly and then hits bad patches that it crunches on for a long time then there's hope. If it's been consistently crunching a long time on every single sector so far then I'd try skipping ahead to 10%, then 20%, then 30% and if it's crunching just as slowly and never doing any quick spurts then I'd say it's a waste of time.
If you have nothing better to do with that spare box and he's a REAL good friend, then let it run a couple of months and see what happens. Imagine how pleased he'll be if it ultimately is readable. If that happens I would just advise you to copy that data off there as quickly as possible before it fails again. It won't last long.
Even Gibson says the freezer trick is worth a shot IF THERE'S NOTHING TO LOSE, the trouble is that it's only a short term thing and only works for quick data reads. The effect only lasts for minutes, so the drive needs to be readable with a non-corrupt file system. This only works if the problem is not corrupt sectors and is only Spindle bearing or actuator damage: you freeze it, which causes different metals to contract at different rates which may make it readable for a couple of minutes, and you copy as many files as you can until it warms up and stops working. Then you freeze it and try it again. It's worked a couple of times for me but only on "click of death" drives.
You also only get to try that as a last resort because the moisture will do the drive no good afterwards.
Hope this helps.
LMANDRAKE: Depends on the condition of the drive. I have heard stories of drives running Spinrite for MONTHS and fully readable afterwards. The record so far, according to Gibson, is 6 months (and the drive was readable) but even he admits he would have given up long before that.
Me personally I will not run a drive on Spinrite more than a week unless it's extremely mission critical data and it's a business client. I do have a dedicated box for long Spinrite jobs, but I can't tie it up all the time. There's no way of knowing if it will work and I don't charge my customers unless I can recover some of the data.
First off, be aware you can stop the process any time and continue it if you need to move the drive to another PC. When you stop the process, Spinrite will give you the partition number and a percentage number to 3 decimal places of where it stopped. Write it down. You can alway run Spinrite again later and you will have an opportunity to manually select the starting point for the scan and resume where you left off.
Are you running a level 2 or level 4 scan? Since you are just trying to recover data you should be using level 2. Level 4 takes much longer, and can potential push a bad drive over the edge into oblivion due to the aggressive nature of that level's technique. If you're running level 4 you can switch to level 2 on the fly by toggling to the menu that selects the scan level. Level 4 is only for preventative maintenance on a good drive. It "refreshes" all the sectors by reading them, writing the binary data back inverted, reading it again, and writing it back normally. That strengthens the (analog) recording signal on the media, eliminates magnetic anomalies, and forces the drive's internal error correction to swap out failing sectors BEFORE they become unreadable. You never want to run level 4 on drive that's already got bad sectors. Level 2 just tries to read each sector, tries (very hard) to recover the data in any bad sectors, and swaps out bad sectors.
I'm assuming this a pretty bad drive and that nearly every sector has triggered the "Dynastat" data recovery which tries to rebuild the data in a damaged sector before allowing the drive to swap out the bad sector (otherwise your would lose all the data in that sector). During Dynastat, Spinrite tries to read the sector 2000 times using different techniques, it then reassembles the data by aggregating all the partial data reads from the 2000 passes. This takes time on a really bad drive since with timeouts I've seen it take and hour to reconstruct a really bad sector.
I assume at this stage you're just trying to salvage data (the OS is probably a lost cause anyway). One thing you can do is stop Spinrite, make a note of where it left off in case you want to resume it later, and then manually skip ahead to another part of the drive more likely to contain data. I use this technique often to save time.
For example, if this is a WinXP OS on the drive, and it's an 80Gb drive, then most of the data is most likely to be stored somewhere past the 10% mark. If it's a Vista OS then the data is likely to be somewhere past the 20% mark. Skip ahead and see if you get lucky and get past the really bad section you're in and you might be able to read most of the data.
If the drive is doing a lot of clicking and pausing (click ogf death) then it may very well be a lost cause because even if the data recovery works, the drive has mechanical issues with it's actuator and you may still not be able to get any data off of it. Matter of fact it's really not worth running Spinrite on a click of death drive since the problem likely has nothing to do with the media: it's going to be a spindle or head actuator issue, and Spinrite can't do anything about that.
It's a personal call. After doing a lot of Spinrite recoveries over the years I get a pretty good feel for whether or not I'm wasting time on a drive. If the drive has spurts where it blows through sectors quickly and then hits bad patches that it crunches on for a long time then there's hope. If it's been consistently crunching a long time on every single sector so far then I'd try skipping ahead to 10%, then 20%, then 30% and if it's crunching just as slowly and never doing any quick spurts then I'd say it's a waste of time.
If you have nothing better to do with that spare box and he's a REAL good friend, then let it run a couple of months and see what happens. Imagine how pleased he'll be if it ultimately is readable. If that happens I would just advise you to copy that data off there as quickly as possible before it fails again. It won't last long.
Even Gibson says the freezer trick is worth a shot IF THERE'S NOTHING TO LOSE, the trouble is that it's only a short term thing and only works for quick data reads. The effect only lasts for minutes, so the drive needs to be readable with a non-corrupt file system. This only works if the problem is not corrupt sectors and is only Spindle bearing or actuator damage: you freeze it, which causes different metals to contract at different rates which may make it readable for a couple of minutes, and you copy as many files as you can until it warms up and stops working. Then you freeze it and try it again. It's worked a couple of times for me but only on "click of death" drives.
You also only get to try that as a last resort because the moisture will do the drive no good afterwards.
Hope this helps.
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“The Government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket.” - Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez
“The Government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket.” - Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez