SpinRite efficacy after hard drives dance with a two year old

[PliotronX]

Hey there so I'm troubleshooting a computer after a friend went to boot their computer only to find a veritable bootmgr missing error. So I pop in a win disc and proceed to try to rebuild BCD and auto repair but no dice then discover in the bios the HDD has taken a hit in lifespan via SMART. Apparently the resident two year old loves to rapidly flick electronic devices on and off including a $1200 computer. So even in the command prompt the partitions are incorrectly reported I know this HDD is pretty much toast but since it is recognized I'm going to try to see what spin rite will do. What I'm wondering is from prior experience spin rite may refuse to proceed on this drive or freeze on one area of the disk and I've got to tryy darndest to recover irreplaceable images of the said two year olds early life (perhaps this kid is craftier than he appears and is destroying evidence his parents can embarrass him later with). Does anyone think I should wait to get a fresh hard drive in there before attempting recovery? What's your experience with spin rite?

 

[Phynaz]

Spinrite isn't going to help with a logical issue (partitions).

If the data is important I'd look into a data recovery service.

 

[smakme7757]

I've used Spinrite in the past and it's usually done a pretty good job. I almost always try to take a Disk image if at all possible. Both before and after attempted repairs.

If the experts are out of the question (too much money etc.) Then I would run Spinrite at level 2 (surface scan, from memory) which is a fast run to check the overall health of the drive. I'm pretty sure it will try to recover bad sectors if some are found.

Just start it up in an old PC and leave it running until it finishes. I used SR on a 300GB disk full of bad sectors and child abuse and it took around 36 hours to complete. In the end the drive was bootable and i managed to get an image with Acronis which made file recovery very easy.

Worst case it might overwrite or corrupt some files, but I highly doubt it would worsen an already out of shape disk.

 

[fzabkar]

SpinRite is drive-killing snake oil.

If your drive has weak heads, then SpinRite will repetitively hammer a "bad" sector up to several thousand times hoping for just one good read. But even if it is successful, it will write the recovered back to the same faulty drive instead of to a clone. This methodology accelerates the failure of an already failing head.

Your best approach would be to clone your drive, sector by sector, using a tool such as ddrescue which understands how to work around bad media. Then run data recovery software against the clone.