SpinRite

[fzabkar]

Hmm. New batch of drives arrived from eBay seller. One of them, a Quantum Fireball (IDE) has a burnt chip. Wonder how that happened?

I believe this is a common problem with these PCBs, ie not a misadventure by the user.

[lcoughey]

It didn't take long. He just called me an ignorant Internet troll.

You know way more that Steve does.

It just shows how much of a bubble these gusys are in. I don't think there is a data recovery or storage related forum on the English speaking internet where Franc isn't an active member, usually correcting the pros with his seemingly unlimited knowledge.

So, yeah...my vote is for Franc over Steve (scammer) Gibson.

[Joep]

I've just joined the GRC forum. Let's see how long before Steve gives me the boot.

This should be fun!

I have been kicked from GRC forums once already

Not by Steve but by some guy he appointed as moderator.

[Joep]

Here is a response from Serge:

We’ve noticed cases like this several years ago, i.e. drives which would read 1 of 8 logical sectors from a single physical sector. We thought it might be a bug with our tools, so we spent some time testing this, concluded that this is real drive behavior sometimes, and dropped the subject. It’s a bit hard to remember at this point, but I seem to recall that this 1 logical sector that comes back as successful isn’t actually a real read, i.e. it’s garbage data that’s coming back due to some firmware bug of the drive. You guys can check this out, i.e. read that suspicious good sector and check if hex values seem valid.

A key point of larger sector sizes is to combine the ECC together because less space can be spent on ECC that way, so it’s extremely unlikely that any drive is able to successfully correct only 1 logical sector from a physical sector, it should be all or nothing. IIRC drive firmware doesn’t even have a concept of logical sectors internally, there is just a conversion that takes place at the end.

Yes, this is more or less what I expected. Thanks for asking him!

[Joep]

but your facts are wrong because you are assuming that you know and understand what SpinRite is doing.

LOL!

Well .. that's kind of my problem with it AND I have some idea what it's doing and I can see why you'd try to hide that: There's zero super advanced stuff going on.

I argued in newsgroup (https://www.grc.com/x/news.exe?cmd=arti ... 2436&utag=):

"There's too much vagueness. It should be made bloody obvious what SR is
doing in what circumstances."

[CrazyTeeka]

I'll have more time after the weekend. Going to see friends over the weekend.

[lcoughey]

While not dealing with the technical side of things, I couldn't help but jump in. Let's see if my first post will be my last.

[Joep]

Anyway, I had clashes with Steve before and MO seems to be: Try counter what you say and when you do not yield, he'll simply ignore it. So I am wondering if you'll see another reply from him.

[Joep]

I'll have more time after the weekend. Going to see friends over the weekend.

You got friends?

[CrazyTeeka]

While not dealing with the technical side of things, I couldn't help but jump in. Let's see if my first post will be my last.

That's a good post on how data recovery should be done. Nice one!