SpinRite

[CrazyTeeka]

Disclaimer: Recovery Force Data Recovery cannot be held responsible for uncontrollable states of rolling on the floor while laughing your ass off while talking about SpinRite 6.1!

First thing to know about SpinRite 6.1 is it's a slave to the system's BIOS, the BIOS is the master and SpinRite is the slave. SpinRite has to accept as fact whatever the BIOS reports back with. Steve admits that.

Second thing to know is because SpinRite relies on the BIOS it is subject to making the drive do hundreds of reads on bad sectors.

Test #1: I compared SpinRite 6.1 vs RapidSpar Disk Imager...

1. RapidSpar Disk Imager on Balanced Mode cloned the whole drive with just 81 sectors not recoverable.
2. SpinRite 6.1 on Level 2 scanned the whole drive with just 81 sectors not recoverable.

SpinRite stresses the drive for 5 whole minutes while trying hundreds of reads hoping to get data samples. Compared to professional disk imagers that allow much more control over the drive.

SpinRite Detailed Technical Log:

[CrazyTeeka]

Steve refuses to fix some textual errors on the UI:

On level 2 for example you have this text:

Code: Select all

( Recover unreadable media)

Easy to fix having something like:

Code: Select all

( Recover unreadable media )

or

Code: Select all

( Recover Unreadable Media )

[Joep]

are you in newsgroup too or just GRC's forum?

[CrazyTeeka]

are you in newsgroup too or just GRC's forum?

I'm in both. I even found a way into Steve's private GitLab.

[Joep]

are you in newsgroup too or just GRC's forum?

I'm in both. I even found a way into Steve's private GitLab.

Where he keeps the secret sauce?

[CrazyTeeka]

Where he keeps the secret sauce?

Probably. But I only have the rights to create bug reports, don't have source code access.

[Joep]

But isn't that because he very badly configured gitlab. He made everyone 'developer'.

[CrazyTeeka]

But isn't that because he very badly configured gitlab. He made everyone 'developer'.

Yes. Everyone has Developer role.

[CrazyTeeka]

Ran a 2nd scan on level 2 again but using "dynastat 0" this time...

Where did all the bad sectors go?

[CrazyTeeka]

I cloned the same drive again with the RapidSpar Disk Imager. The previous 81 unreadable blocks have gone, it's now zero, so somethings happened, hmm interesting.

I can only assume that had this been a real Data Recovery case, 81 blocks of data are now gone, this clearly is not a real Data Recovery tool, but is still being marketed as one, and people are still using it, and losing data.