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Restore A Quick Formatted Drive In Windows? Also Cost Of IDE RAID
I need a program that functions like HDD Regenerator, eg: to restore a
quick formatted partition. DOS and HDD Regenerator won't work with a usb to ide disk adapter. GetDataBack and the like only want to restore data to other drives, not restore the same drive. |
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Restore A Quick Formatted Drive In Windows? Also Cost Of IDE RAID
Forgot to post the ide raid question. I'll formulate and post that
question later. |
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Restore A Quick Formatted Drive In Windows? Also Cost Of IDE RAID
On Sat, 28 Mar 2009 16:09:35 -0700 (PDT), Justin Goldberg
put finger to keyboard and composed: I need a program that functions like HDD Regenerator, eg: to restore a quick formatted partition. DOS and HDD Regenerator won't work with a usb to ide disk adapter. GetDataBack and the like only want to restore data to other drives, not restore the same drive. I don't use HDD Regenerator, but the following product does not appear to "restore a quick formatted partition". Instead its author claims it will repair "physical bad sectors". shrug HDD Regenerator 1.61: http://www.dposoft.net/#b_hddhid Program features Ability to detect physical bad sectors on a hard disk drive surface. Ability to repair physical bad sectors (magnetic errors) on a hard disk surface. The product ignores file system, scans disk at physical level. It can be used with FAT, NTFS or any other file system, and also with unformatted or unpartitioned disks. How it works Almost 60% of all hard drives damaged with bad sectors have an incorrectly magnetized disk surface. We have developed an algorithm which is used to repair damaged disk surfaces. This technology is hardware independent, it supports many types of hard drives and repairs damage that even low-level disk formatting cannot repair. - Franc Zabkar -- Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email. |
#4
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Restore A Quick Formatted Drive In Windows? Also Cost Of IDE RAID
Franc Zabkar wrote:
On Sat, 28 Mar 2009 16:09:35 -0700 (PDT), Justin Goldberg put finger to keyboard and composed: I need a program that functions like HDD Regenerator, eg: to restore a quick formatted partition. DOS and HDD Regenerator won't work with a usb to ide disk adapter. GetDataBack and the like only want to restore data to other drives, not restore the same drive. I don't use HDD Regenerator, but the following product does not appear to "restore a quick formatted partition". Instead its author claims it will repair "physical bad sectors". shrug HDD Regenerator 1.61: http://www.dposoft.net/#b_hddhid Program features Ability to detect physical bad sectors on a hard disk drive surface. Ability to repair physical bad sectors (magnetic errors) on a hard disk surface. Well, either this simply runs a long SMART selftest or just repeatedly tries to read a bad sector, or it is plain fraud. The product ignores file system, scans disk at physical level. It can be used with FAT, NTFS or any other file system, and also with unformatted or unpartitioned disks. Just as a long SMART selftest or a manual surface read. How it works Almost 60% of all hard drives damaged with bad sectors have an incorrectly magnetized disk surface. We have developed an algorithm which is used to repair damaged disk surfaces. Obviously nonsense. This technology is hardware independent, it supports many types of hard drives and repairs damage that even low-level disk formatting cannot repair. Soooo, low-level access that is hardware independent? Fascinating. Arno |
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Restore A Quick Formatted Drive In Windows? Also Cost Of IDE RAID
On 29-Mar-2009, Arno wrote: Almost 60% of all hard drives damaged with bad sectors have an incorrectly magnetized disk surface. We have developed an algorithm which is used to repair damaged disk surfaces. Either the read/write head is working correctly, or it isn't , and if it isn't the drive is a doorstop. There can be a bad area due to defective magnetic media coating, this is usually marked as non-existant by the mfr. who allocates an equivalent amount from a pool. Some mfrs have utilities that can mask out a "small" number of bad locations that develop in use, and allocate replacements from the pool. You can't physically repair a damaged disk surface, it is in a sealed unit. |
#6
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Restore A Quick Formatted Drive In Windows? Also Cost Of IDE RAID
Justin Goldberg wrote:
Franc Zabkar wrote in news On Sat, 28 Mar 2009 16:09:35 -0700 (PDT), Justin Goldberg put finger to keyboard and composed: Almost 60% of all hard drives damaged with bad sectors have an incorrectly magnetized disk surface. We have developed an algorithm which is used to repair damaged disk surfaces. This technology is hardware independent, it supports many types of hard drives and repairs damage that even low-level disk formatting cannot repair. - Franc Zabkar From following this group I've found that spinrite is absolute rubbish, and now hdd regenerator is rubbish too? They claim to do something that is not possible. So, yes. I've tried to debate with the spinrite developers on news.grc.com using some of the arguments against it from this newsgroup, but it never goes anywhere, so I gave up: http://12078.net/grcnews/article.php....spinrite.dev# 12230 Their product used to have merit in the old MFM times. Today, they are just cashing in on the remainder of that reputation. Arno |
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So should I use getdataback, then?
You can't physically repair a damaged disk surface, it is in a sealed unit. You can read it with a scanning tunneling microscope, lol. True, if you don't mind spending the rest of your days reading it bit by bit. |
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Restore A Quick Formatted Drive In Windows? Also Cost Of IDE RAID
On Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:20:32 GMT, Justin Goldberg
put finger to keyboard and composed: From following this group I've found that spinrite is absolute rubbish, and now hdd regenerator is rubbish too? I believe that Steve Gibson makes some bogus claims (eg that magnetic domains weaken over time), but the basic methodology behind Spinrite seems logical to me. By that I mean that Spinrite will turn off ECC and try to read a bad sector up to 2000 times. If at the end it doesn't achieve an error free read, then it will try to reconstruct the sector based on the most probable value of each bit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinrite#Features OTOH, the author of HDD Regenerator claims that he uses an undisclosed algorithm which is hardware independent. This would mean that he is limited to whatever ATA commands are available to him via the ATA spec, as is Steve Gibson. It seems to me that the easiest "hardware independent" solution would be to read the bad sector up to 2000 times and give SMART a chance to reallocate it. - Franc Zabkar -- Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email. |
#9
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Restore A Quick Formatted Drive In Windows? Also Cost Of IDE RAID
Franc Zabkar wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:20:32 GMT, Justin Goldberg put finger to keyboard and composed: From following this group I've found that spinrite is absolute rubbish, and now hdd regenerator is rubbish too? I believe that Steve Gibson makes some bogus claims (eg that magnetic domains weaken over time), but the basic methodology behind Spinrite seems logical to me. It used to be that, in the old MFM times. It does not work for the modern encodings used in the last decade or so. By that I mean that Spinrite will turn off ECC and try to read a bad sector up to 2000 times. The reading 2000 times you can do manually. The manual ECC is not in any way better than what the drive can do. If at the end it doesn't achieve an error free read, then it will try to reconstruct the sector based on the most probable value of each bit. You do not want that for modern drives. It is not quite as inaccurate as leaving the sector filles with zeros, but comes close. For most applications it will either not matter (so zeros can be used) or it will be a complete desaster anyways (comressed data, e.g.) If zeros are fine, you can use e.g. dd_rescue (free, very small) under Linux. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinrite#Features OTOH, the author of HDD Regenerator claims that he uses an undisclosed algorithm which is hardware independent. This would mean that he is limited to whatever ATA commands are available to him via the ATA spec, as is Steve Gibson. It seems to me that the easiest "hardware independent" solution would be to read the bad sector up to 2000 times and give SMART a chance to reallocate it. Indeed. The Sstrength of the SpinRite description is that it did make sense for older HDD technology. It does not anymore today. One thing is that the on-disk encoduing used to be standardized in the MFM/RLL days and the ECC was standard as well. This is not true anymore today, and reading with ECC off does not make any sense. Also because today HDDs use some partial-response maximum- likelyhood decoding, which means they do not read 0 and 1 but analog values. You cannot interpret them without exactly knowing what modulation has been used and what encoding. Arno |
#10
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Restore A Quick Formatted Drive In Windows? Also Cost Of IDE RAID
On 30 Mar 2009 05:45:52 GMT, Arno put finger to
keyboard and composed: The Sstrength of the SpinRite description is that it did make sense for older HDD technology. It does not anymore today. One thing is that the on-disk encoduing used to be standardized in the MFM/RLL days and the ECC was standard as well. This is not true anymore today, and reading with ECC off does not make any sense. I referred to my copy of IBM's Personal Computer AT Technical Reference Manual. The Fixed Disk Adapter section talks about the Read Sector command. In those days the Command Register's bit definitions for this command were as follows: 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 --------------- 0 0 1 0 0 0 L T L = 0 for data only, 1 for data plus 4-byte ECC T = 0 for retries enabled, 1 for retries disabled This IDE reference talks about the above Read Long commands (22h and 23h): http://www.repairfaq.org/filipg/LINK/F_IDE-tech.html However, I don't see a corresponding command in today's ATA specification. It was present in ATA-3 but seems to have been retired in ATA-4. http://www.t10.org/t13/project/d2008r7b-ATA-3.pdf http://www.t10.org/t13/project/d1153r18-ATA-ATAPI-4.pdf So you are correct -- today's drives do not appear to be able to retrieve the ECC data. My apologies. There are some claims on Steve Gibson's web site which I don't understand. How SpinRite RECOVERS Unreadable Data: http://www.grc.com/srrecovery.htm Gibson believes that data can be lost during SMART's reallocation process. Surely such a claim is bogus: "Hard disk drives 'heal themselves' by replacing defective sectors with spares. The problem is that the drive does this on its own, without asking or notifying, and in the process vital data is too-easily lost." He then disables SMART to prevent automatic reallocation: "The FIRST THING SpinRite does when it starts examining and working with a drive is to completely disable the drive's built-in automatic sector relocation. This way the drive can't whisk the sector away the first time it's not easily read, and SpinRite can study the sector to recover its data as much as necessary." What does Gibson mean by "whisk away"? If he means "automatically reallocate", then surely this is the most desirable outcome. Instead Gibson hammers away at the bad sector until he successfully retrieves the data, and *then* re-enables SMART so that the drive can reallocate the bad sector. This seems pointless to me. If it is true that there is no longer any Read Long command in the ATA spec, then I find the following statement curious: "Rather than ignoring the data from a bad read, SpinRite uses its unique 'hardware level access' (which no other utility has) to read whatever data the drive was able to get from the bad sector." Is Gibson claiming to use some manufacturer specific commands to gain access to the raw uncorrected data (including ECC ?) in much the same way as the old Read Long command was able to do? Do some manufacturers still support an undocumented Read Long command, even though the ATA spec appears to have retired it? Gibson also claims that ... "If several thousand sector re-reads all fail to produce a single perfect reading, SpinRite next employs the database it has been building from each failed sector reading. By performing a statistical analysis of this data, SpinRite is frequently able to reconstruct all of the sector's data, even though no single reading was perfect." This begs the question, if SpinRite is unable to read the ECC bytes from the drive, then how is it able to confirm the integrity of the reconstructed data? I also notice the following statement in the ATA-7 spec: "An unrecoverable error encountered during the execution of [the READ SECTOR(S)] command results in the termination of the command. The Command Block registers contain the address of the sector where the first unrecoverable error occurred. The amount of data transferred is indeterminate." This suggests that the data from a bad sector may or may not be transferred. It may be that only an error status bit (UNC = uncorrectable) is set. (???) - Franc Zabkar -- Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email. |
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