Hi Martin,
I used Spinrite frequently in it's earlier incarnations. It and Norton had routines for determining the optimum interleave (before it became 1 for all drives) and for refreshing drives when tolerances allowed for some head drift and before defrag programs moved data around so much that anything more was redundant. However, I'm not sure how useful it is today. Use to be you could pick up a new bad sector a week where as nowadays, I rarely see one in a year. Mostly, the electronics go bad first and I don't believe spinrite can recover data lost from bad electronics. That said, it has always been inexpensive and Steve Gibson has been, at least to my knowledge, a generous contributor to PCdom. He also knows a lot more about computers than I do, so I'm sure it has a value exceeding it's cost in the right hands. I haven't looked at it in a few years. The way it use to work, simplisticly speaking, was: when scandisk can't read a sector, it recovers the program containing that sector by relocating the data from the bad sector. If it can't get a good read in its numerous retries, it leaves that sector's data as gibberish. Spinrite would read the sector multiple times creating kind of a histogram of the bit layout and using the weighted average to assign values to the bits and bytes. So instead of losing 256 characters you might only lose a bit or two. On a text file that's great. On an exe it doesn't matter as they tend not to work with a bad bit as much as with 255 bad bytes; worth a shot in a pinch, but then I wouldn't trust it for a longer term as a changed bit might introduce a subtle error. Where it really use to shine was on floppies. I had a number of times I received flawed floppies from a manufacturer and fixed them with spinrite instead waiting for a two week turnaround on an RMA. (Still had to do the RMA since I couldn't be sure each recovered bit was correct, but it took the sting out and I don't recall ever seeing any of the aforementioned "subtle errors") But, everything started coming on CD so that use also went by the wayside. Besides, it took forever, so you really had to want and need the lost data.
So that's my experience, albeit dated. If you find new advantages that aren't handled by Systemworks, please let us know.
Best,
Steve |
