Re: [Bug-ddrescue] ddrescue support questions

[DePriest, Jason R.]

On 6/2/07, James W. Watts  wrote:
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> Since all of the above have failed (I don't have much faith in Spinrite at this 
> point), I turned
> to Google. As an aside, what is the deal with Spinrite? What does it do? How 
> does it fit into the
> data recovery field? It seems pretty stumped w/ my friend's HD at the moment. 
> Thoughts?
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SpinRite.  What version?  I use version 6.

It isn't a recovery program so much as a repair program.  It tries to
recover as much of your data from the damaged parts of the drive and
put it somewhere that isn't damaged.
It sort of iterates down into damaged sectors to get as much as it can.

If you could get SpinRite to process the drive and actually repair the
drive enough to recover some data, I would immediately make an image
of the drive.

It worked for me once.  I had a drive that was unbootable and
undetectable.  Every once in a while, if I was lucky, I could get the
drive to be seen by the BIOS (but unable to mount it).

I ran SpinRite on it for about 72 hours and I was able to mount it and
recover the few files I really wanted.  Mainly, I wanted my 3 GB PGP
encrypted disk, which I got.

-Jason

-Jason