I thought the general consensus was that tool wasn't really useful any longer and actually was recommended against being used. It seemed to just wear out a failing drive faster, thwarting an future attempts to read data from it.
I know this won't work in the case brought up (drive will not even spin up), but what I usually try out for drives that detect but are failing and can't be read normally is the following:
1.) Use a utility known as ddrescue to get as accurate of a copy of the disk as possible to reliable media (located on many recovery or forensics live CD/DVDs).
- This tool is a derivative of dd_rescue, which in turn was based of the original dd command, more info here: http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html
- You can either copy directly to another disk or to an image file on another storage medium (I prefer latter so that is can be moved around and copied easily)
- You can stop/start the read operations and execute additional times in which case it can fill in bad spots of the copy if it's able to without losing already recovered data
2.) Run any number of recovery tools on a copy of the recovered data, I like to try higher level tools from Ontrack or Runtime first, as they are better at recovering filenames and folder paths. I also always run testdisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk), which fixes partition and mbr issues, and photorec (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec) which tries to recover files directly and ignores FAT and partition info. The latter is very helpful with recovering files, but you won't have correct filenames or paths.
It's not the quickest process (I will many times run ddrescue 10 or more times), but I have had decent success with recovering files (especially photos and music which no body backs up).
Hope this helps some in the future.
-Steve Bogdanski
>>> On 5/18/2010 at 12:32 PM, "Charlot, Firmin" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
This might be a long shot but for the cost it may be worth a try.
Steve Gibson a security expert at GRC.com has a tool that might help. For more info go to
http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
Firm.
