There is only a very small niche use for Spinrite.
Fixing a failing harddrive isn't one of them.
Yup. Returned it as it wouldn't work as advertised, on SCSI drives.
On SCSI drives it was a very expensive alternative for Scandisk/Chkdisk.
It actually disabled SCSI's natural ability to replace bad sectors.
How was it, did it fix the disk?
It is snake oil.
Mostly, but not entirely.
Go read
www.grcsucks.com for more info.
There is no info there.
There is no way to magically fix bad sectors on a harddrive.
Yes there is, it is called Spinrite, obviously. ;-)
Magically, no.
Can it fix slow reading sectors (bad sectors reading successfully after
retries), sure.
By trying it's damnest to fault the read and force the drive into replacing
the 'to become but not yet bad' sector.
Can it retrieve data from unrecoverable read error bad sectors? Possibly.
By trying it's damnest to read the bad sectors by retries and forcing the
drive to hit on the sector using different skews. If that doesn't get it, it
can do a bunch of reads and statistically combine reads to determine the
most likely true data and reconstruct it by writing the result back to the
sector or to a free sector.
Right, attempt. But not indefinetely as otherwise it will hang the system.
There's where Spinrite comes in.
to substitute good sectors from it's "spares" automatically.
Attempt, right. And it's a rather feeble attempt too.
Actually it is not even an attempt to replace because drives have always
done retries and it is after retries succeed within certain boundaries that
the drive will spare the sector (if necessary).
If you are continuing to show bad sectors when you run chkdsk,
Which is very likely with unrecoverable read error bad sectors.
then get the diagnostic tool from the harddrive maker's website and see
if your drive is failing.
Which will clear your drive's data in the proces.
