2,000 hours of work to cram in the next 8...

[TechnoPro]

I'm currentyly running SpinRite on a laptop to "fix" the hard drive, or at very least let Acronis TrueImage read it correctly for a reimage. This is to avoid a reformat and reinstall. SpinRite is quoting me close to 2,000 hours remaining to complete the job. I have 8.

One one hand, I can give up on the simplicity of the reimaging job and reformat, since I have all the data and drivers at hand. On the flip side, I have a gut feeling that once SpinRite is done with this particular bad block, the rest of the HDD will be smooth sailing.

What would you do? And to make this clear, I am not looking for technical advice. I seek councel in the realm of time management.

 

[Jeff7]

Bad sectors I imagine? Spinrite can take a LONG time with those things. Hope that you only have one or two.
Time prediction in software isn't always the most sophisticated - otherwise, you'd have a Time Remaining calculation algorithm that'd take more processing power than the process it's measuring.

 

[jamesbond007]

Not cheap, but it works *VERY* well. The amount of data I've had to recover from people's broken harddrives have paid the cost many times over.

Recovery rate is second to none - amazing how well it works, actually. Download the trial and see what it can do/find for you.

 

[TechnoPro]

Originally posted by: Jeff7
Bad sectors I imagine? Spinrite can take a LONG time with those things. Hope that you only have one or two.
Time prediction in software isn't always the most sophisticated - otherwise, you'd have a Time Remaining calculation algorithm that'd take more processing power than the process it's measuring.

Bad sectors indeed. The wonderful device now reports 4,200 hours remaining, and is still plugging away at the first sector. SpinRite has saved my skin in the past, usually taking 48 hours to do its miracles. Time is not on my side today.

This system was apparently functional until I asked the user whether she had encountered any errors since I instaled XP in place of a very messy W2K installation. She said yes, she had experienced errors, which surprised me since I was uber-meticulous about setting things up perfectly for her. I check the error log, and lo and behold, disk errors. A CHKDSK /F followed by a reboot is what killed the machine... Literally, it will not boot back into Windows after that. Gets stuck at the blue bar sliding back and forth.

 

[TechnoPro]

Originally posted by: jamesbond007
Not cheap, but it works *VERY* well. The amount of data I've had to recover from people's broken harddrives have paid the cost many times over.

Recovery rate is second to none - amazing how well it works, actually. Download the trial and see what it can do/find for you.

I've used it before - it's good. I'm using a product by R-Studio now. Don't ask me how it works, but SpinRite is a miracle. When data recovery fails due to errors with the drive, often times SpinRite fixes them sufficiently to make data recovery or imaging possible.