I'm REALLY late to the party, but, that's fashionable, isn't it? We have run SpinRite here at AgEcon for years, I've been using it personally for ~1.5 years, and I'm very impressed with it. I think it's one of those rare, miracle products that actually does what it claims and is easily worth the money. Of course, it doesn't fix physical failures of any kind, but, we're surprised after using it for some time now how many "Windows won't boot this morning" and "error reading drive" type problems it fixes. We're getting to the point where we grab it quickly and do much less troubleshooting on these types of problems, and, I'm happy to say we've been right to do so--it's repaired a lot of them without us wasting time doing troubleshooting. Brian Hoort -----Original Message----- From: MSU Network Administrators Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of David McFarlane Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2009 2:13 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] How hard should you hit an ailing hard drive? 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