It's time again to bring out a old tools. Spinrite. I am not sure how many of you have heard of this. Back in those days, this tool was one of its kind. You basically use this to non-destructively rewrite your whole HDD. Why you want to do that is clearly explained at http://www.spinrite.com
Now, Spinrite has many mode. The fastest is the test mode which I ran against my other HDD. HDD Regenrator sure saved my HDD. Fact of life. But Spinrite ran at like 100x the speed. It took like 30 minutes to complete where HDD Regenrator took 16 hours. OK, not 100x, but you get the idea.
However, do keep in mind the test level is probably different. And leaving this to run over the night 7 hours and 7 minutes has no difference. I say, both these tools are great things to keep and run at as good periodical testing. Audits should include a question that check if the HDD is periodically tested :) Rather than waiting for it to go bad sector and fail on you. You agree?
4 comments:
Although spinrite was good 16 years ago it is not useful in Windows 7 because it does not repair the file systme so if chkdsk fails then Spinrite will not help and do not try at that price -$85-!
Neither of these tools fix the filesystem, you have to run filesystem repair tools like chkdsk after running them.
Yes, indeed. These tools fixes the hardware level by moving the bad block to good blocks.
You will still need to use a file level tools to fix any file level type of errors.
I've been using SpinRite for almost 8 years. It has repaired things that even HDD Regenerator wasn't able to repair. As for the Windows 7 compatibility, that's true, but it isn't designed for filesystem repair, but rather hardware level repair. It repairs the surface of the magnetic medium that your filesystem lives on. If you get failures on your filesystem, it's actually better to use SpinRite first, so that the filesystem tools can be "guaranteed" that the data structures they are reading are accurate. Also it'd be pointless to rebuild the filesystem on sectors that can't be read back. SpinRite can fix those. Lastly, it's DEFINITELY worth the $89. Loose your childrens birth photos once and you'd be happy to pay 10 times that to get them back. Luckily I got mine back, thanks to SpinRite.
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