Recovery Force® Data Recovery Forum

fzabkar wrote: ↑Wed Nov 15, 2023 6:09 pm It would be interesting to hear what DeepSpar have to say about this "partial physical sector" anomaly.

fzabkar wrote: ↑Wed Nov 15, 2023 6:01 pm

Joep wrote:For example, SR hasn't got a clue about SMART stats as reported by Seagate drives.

Steve distrusts SMART because he doesn't understand it. As you say, the one time that he tried to make use of SMART, he made a complete mess of things. His mistake was to apply intuitive logic to a counterintuitive case, specifically a Seagate drive. Essentially, SpinRite took a perfectly healthy drive and just kept spewing out thousands of bogus errors.

https://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?p=21743#p21743

There's been ample evidence in the past that some drives simply lie about their SMART status to appear healthier than they are.

fzabkar wrote: ↑Wed Nov 15, 2023 11:24 pm This is the summary of SpinRite's log. It's just too consistent to be a coincidence. If the first 7 sectors are unreadable, can the 8th sector ever be trusted, even if it reads without error?

Move on to the current SpinRite 6.1 pre-release, SRPR-RC5 - I found the controls to be more responsive.

I also consider 'conservative' command line options, like FORCEBIOS and DYNASTAT 1.

Let us know how it works for you.

I also use supplemental cooling fans to keep the drive at room temperature, and I remove and replace the drive's circuit board and clean the contacts underneath.

Thanks.

Note that DBAN is not acceptable in UK Government use because it only cleans LBA-addressable sectors. You have to use Blancco or some other accredited utility, which also wipes spare sectors and ex-LBA sectors that have gone bad and been spared out (grown defects). It's also why Steve has Beyond Recall as a slated future project - his knowledge of the ATA command set would allow him to do a much more thorough job than DBAN.

lcoughey wrote: ↑Thu Nov 16, 2023 4:23 pm spinrite.png

Is the first statement really true? How can anyone claim that a process that does not transfer a single sector from a failing drive with a high chance of completete failure and head crash is data recovery?

And to the statement that it was a tie between RapidSpar and Spinrite, how can that be? After Spinrite was done, the only copy of the user data is still on only one drive that is failing. Meanwhile, after RapidSpar is done, the data also exists on a stable drive.

lcoughey wrote: ↑Thu Nov 16, 2023 4:47 pm It probably wouldn't hurt to reword it, though I wasn't pushing for it. But, they do need to see reality.