Folks,
Thanks again for your continuing advice and insights.
As it happens, having repeatedly scanned the ailing hard drive with a recovery utility, it's decided to come back to life -- at least for now. I forgot that my wife of course had her entire iTunes library on this computer; it has been rescued and backed up (just days after Apple finally announces the end of DRM for that which you have bought).
For the record, I did not apply percussive maintenance, however the incident happily confirms that some high-frequency hearing remains.
/rich
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 5:28 PM, STeve Andre'
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
On Thursday 15 January 2009 14:13:08 David McFarlane wrote:
> Arriving late to the party...
>
> At 1/14/2009 11:20 AM Wednesday, Nicholas Oas wrote:
> >Like Laurence said, your symptom could be due to software corruption
> >and have little to do with the mechanical hd.
>
> Speaking of recovering corrupted sectors from an ailing (but still
> spinning) HDD, this might be the time to ask if anybody has any
> experience with SpinRite from Gibson Research (a search of the MSUNAG
> Archives show this was last discussed on 4 Sep 2007). I have heard
> wondrous stories about its data recovery capabilies, but those mostly
> come from testimonials read by the developer himself on his security
> podcast. Although I own a license, I have never had the opportunity
> to use SpinRite for data recovery myself so I have no stories of my own.
>
> Thanks,
> -- dkm
I found R Studio to be *far* better. SpinRite did indeed seem to spin
the disk, but it didn't do much to find anything. R Studio sat there
for an hour or two and then came up with a listing of files, and actually
did pluck those files from the bad disk.
R Studio is bound to the particular machine its set up on however, so
you want to devote a system to that. R Studio is also a GPL copyright
violation: its based on a flavour of Linux but does not offer the source
code anywhere that I could see.
--STeve Andre'