SpinRite

[Joep]

Does anyone know where the development of SpinRite is heading? Does anyone have the v6.1 beta versions? Is there a changelog?

I have been following it.

Major thing in 6.0 -> 6.1 is stop using BIOS to access ATA drives. Many of what follows is issues that surfaced as a result of that. So for example no longer relying on BIOS you have to handle all quirks that mat arise when talking to a drive using ATA commands rather than BIOS int13h calls.
And lots of it is it stopping working with screen thief, not responding to user input .. practical stuff.
Stuff like treating SMART RAW values wrong for past 20 years .. Detect TRIM to have some idea if it's working on SMR or SSD etc.. So apart from actual beef (remove dependency on BIOS for disk IO) lot's of house hold stuff ..

As for heading: Idea is to move to RTOS32 for version 7 (https://www.real-time-systems.com/on-time-rtos-32/) for which he bought license + source code. He will be 'porting' SR to that, although I don't see how this can be anything else that a rewrite from scratch.

[fzabkar]

I can't help but feel that all the effort is pointless. The author refuses to say what "Dynastat" is actually doing, but AFAICT it is based on false premises and obsolete ATA commands. Moreover, many drives that appear to still support "long reads" will often produce indeterminate results, as explained in Deepspar's blog. So, if Dynastat doesn't work, then what?

If someone wants to test whether their drive supports long reads, this thread contains two MHDD scripts, one for READ LONG (28-bit) and another for SCT READ LONG (48-bit):

https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=28082

Here are two HDDSuperTool scripts:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LUnrFn ... drive_link (ata_sct_readlong)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JCqdE9 ... drive_link (ata28_readlong)

Code: Select all

  echo 'Perform an SCT read long command if supported.'
  echo 'This command requires the number variable "sector" to be set on the command line.'
  echo 'This also requires the string variable "file" to be set.'
  echo '"file" is the name of the file the data will be written to.'
  echo 'Note that even if this command is supported, it may still be of no value.'
  echo 'The ATA documentation states that the data returned may be encoded.'
  echo 'And my experience so far is that the data is usually encoded and totally useless.'
  echo "So don't get your hopes up about using this command to get any worthwhile data."

[lcoughey]

I have a Seagate recovery case here right now where head 3 reads at the lower LBA sectors, but by about 1%, it isn't reading any sectors at all. I'm confident that I can get near 100% read of this drive after a head swap or possibly even with AFH adjustments. However, what would happen to all those sectors if someone were to try to "recover" it with SpinRite?

[CrazyTeeka]

I have a Seagate recovery case here right now where head 3 reads at the lower LBA sectors, but by about 1%, it isn't reading any sectors at all. I'm confident that I can get near 100% read of this drive after a head swap or possibly even with AFH adjustments. However, what would happen to all those sectors if someone were to try to "recover" it with SpinRite?

SpinRite would not know that head 3 has a problem and it would hammer away assuming that it's a bad sector instead, trying hundreds of reads for 5 whole minutes. After it's done there is a high chance of data loss.

If you were to use "level 2,dynastat 0" it would just nuke all bad sectors, resulting in an even worse outcome.

[lcoughey]

So, close to 1/4 of the drive would be lost if it could complete before total failure.

[fzabkar]

I have a Seagate recovery case here right now where head 3 reads at the lower LBA sectors, but by about 1%, it isn't reading any sectors at all. I'm confident that I can get near 100% read of this drive after a head swap or possibly even with AFH adjustments. However, what would happen to all those sectors if someone were to try to "recover" it with SpinRite?

This is a good candidate for a shootout. Why not do the headswap, recover the data, then reinstall the original heads and let SpinRite thrash the drive?

[CrazyTeeka]

So, close to 1/4 of the drive would be lost if it could complete before total failure.

Yes. 1/4 of the drive is a lot of data to lose. But historical in place data recovery means so much to Steve.

[CrazyTeeka]

I have a Seagate recovery case here right now where head 3 reads at the lower LBA sectors, but by about 1%, it isn't reading any sectors at all. I'm confident that I can get near 100% read of this drive after a head swap or possibly even with AFH adjustments. However, what would happen to all those sectors if someone were to try to "recover" it with SpinRite?

This is a good candidate for a shootout. Why not do the headswap, recover the data, then reinstall the original heads and let SpinRite thrash the drive?

[lcoughey]

This is a good candidate for a shootout. Why not do the headswap, recover the data, then reinstall the original heads and let SpinRite thrash the drive?

My thoughts exactly. It will somewhat depend on what the client decides on my quote and if they will permit me to keep the drive when all is said and done.

[Joep]

I can't help but feel that all the effort is pointless. The author refuses to say what "Dynastat" is actually doing, but AFAICT it is based on false premises and obsolete ATA commands. Moreover, many drives that appear to still support "long reads" will often produce indeterminate results, as explained in Deepspar's blog. So, if Dynastat doesn't work, then what?

If someone wants to test whether their drive supports long reads, this thread contains two MHDD scripts, one for READ LONG (28-bit) and another for SCT READ LONG (48-bit):

https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=28082

We do, no?

1. Either is tries read-long. We know what happens then.
2. Or it does reads, upto 2000 times on a single sector and compares to get most probably read.

If 1 we get bogus data with 90% (conservative) certainty.

If 2 we get either nothing (as drive response is binary: either (corrected) data or error + no data). If we get corrected data we don't take that for 'reasons' like a sane person would.