Could Spinrite work on this drive?

[wjgollatz]

I have a drive which has failed.

Windows will see the drive, and its partitions briefly, and then ask to check all the partitions in different windows. If I decline a check, Win7 will have an error and dismount the drive. At one point, while Win7 was checking a partition, I was able to copy data off another partition. I did that only because Win7 was never able to complete a check and I had that limited time to copy data, and didn't really know about Spinrite. Soon after starting a check, the Win7 will announce that the drive must be dismounted, or it will just dismount on its own. (This happened when I check all partitions).

I haven't detected any data corruption, and transfer speeds on a USB seemed right (10-12 Mb/s while doing a check disc). When I detected the system hanging up, the drive would pass a check disk easily, and quickly.

It seems the drive functions, just that Windows can't work with it. Is this a good candidate for Spinrite before I drop $100 on it?

 

[Elixer]

Check the SMART info on the drive in question with something like crystaldiskinfo (free).
Depending on that, (if it says "good") then, I would boot up a linux BOOT CD/USB drive, and see if it can read the files. If no go, then, you can clone the drive to another, and use testdisk (free) on the clone.
Spinrite is overrated IMO, I never got it to fix any drive I tried it on.

 

[rsutoratosu]

I tried spinrite on a disk that had errors on the recovery partition area. It took 6 weeks of scanning, reading, error correcting, etc. and it came back semi working.. recovery still did not work, end up ordering new recovery disks.

So it'll block off bad stuff or try to relocate good data on bad disk but its not 100%..

if you have data, i suggest backing it up and if you want, run spinrite for fun.. but it may take weeks to figure out whats good and bad

 

[corkyg]

Spinrite hasn't been upgraded since version 6 back in January 2010. If the HDD in question is from that era, it should work. Some of the newer TB+ drives are not good candidates.