Any Spinrite alternative?

[lingyi]

I think I asked this a few years ago and a Google search doesn't bring up anything new. Are there any consumer price level data/disc recovery products available? Yes, I know HDD manufacturers have their own disc utilities and data recovery options, but it's nothing like Spinrite.

FYI: Spinrite doesn't work on drives/partitions larger than 2TB which is why it can't be used on most newer larger capacity drives drives.

[lordsmurf]

The best disc recovery is payware ISOBuster or freeware ISO Puzzle.
For HDD recovery, Stellar Phoenix or Ontrack.

And if none of that works, break open the piggy bank, and send ti Kroll Ontrack or DiscSavers. (I've had to do that before.)

[lingyi]

Thank you for the info. I should have been clearer about what I'm looking for.

Software that's pay once, keep forever, that I can keep in my software toolbox. And has a graphical interface with realtime monitoring so I can look under the hood while the program is running. Yeah, probably "I want what no one else does."

It really doesn't matter with current HDD prices so low*, but I used to rerun SpinRite just to see if new bad sectors developed. If not, I'd partition out the portion of the drive that was bad (usually the beginning of the drive) and create another partition with the remainder.**

*I'm the first to advocate tossing or using for non-critical temp files if Crystaldiskinfo gives a yellow caution. If the caution is red, definitely toss the drive.

**Don't do this! I did it when HDDs were much more expensive and IMO it's not worth the risk now.

I know there are detractors that say that SpinRite wasn't as effective as it claimed, but the closest I've come is HDD Regenerator and I haven't used it since (years ago) it failed where SpinRite succeeded, i.e. it did a full recovery of the data on the drive.

[gdx]

What about Drevitalize (https://drevitalize.com/) or Victoria (http://hdd.by/victoria, page in Russian but software in English)

[lingyi]

The direct link to drevitalize doesn't work, but there are some good reviews of it, so I'll keep it in mind.. The link to Victoria works and the screenshots looks like what I'm looking for. I'll do more research on it and see if I can find English info and link. My main concern is there's no confirmation that either works on 2TB+ drives, which is why I dropped Spinrite.

Good info though. TY!

[gdx]

The Drevitalize link works for me also from the changelog:

New in version 2.40 :

Corrected support for 1.5TB+ drives. Now Drevitalize accepts any drive up to 48-bit LBA limit.

and you can always try the demo. And for Victoria google translate is very helpful.

[PixelHunter]

Thank you for the info. I should have been clearer about what I'm looking for.

...Software that's pay once, keep forever...

Here's a thought, send an email to Steve Gibson at GRC and ask for his advice on what is better than his product that is not keeping up with modern technology.

Steve is getting old, but he is nothing if not honest.

[lingyi]

There was talk by Gibson that an update to allow SpinRite to access >2TB drives and AHCI and 7.0 was in the works. Around this time there were reports that Gibson couldn't possibly update the program because be didn't create it as claimed. Whatever the truth is, SpinRite is long gone and unlikely to ever return.

Edit: AFAIK, this was Gibson's last word on SpinRite: https://www.grc.com/x/news.exe?cmd=article&group=grc.spinrite&item=10500&utag=

To answer your question directly, given the questions about the development of SpinRite and Gibson's silence on the matter of the update for 6+ years, I'd rather not bring the subject up to him as it may well be a sore spot.

[abolibibelot]

Spinrite is considered as dangerous by data recovery experts (do a search on forum.hddguru.com for instance). It does not recover one single byte as it is proceeding, and its claims of “repairing” bad sectors are dubious at best (i.e. it does nothing more than the drive's own firmware routines when attempting to overwrite a potentially damaged sector – either the sector can be written to and is thus removed from the “pending” list, or it can't and then it gets reallocated, i.e. replaced by a sector from the “spare” area while its contents get lost in the process).

For testing purposes I would recommend HD Sentinel : constantly checks the SMART status of all connected drives, issues warnings (visual or audible) whenever there's a new issue on either of them, or if temperature goes too high, keeps logs over time, also allows to perform a variety of manual surface scans (read only / write only / read + write + read... it also has a “disk repair” option which does a read scan but forces the reallocation of any bad sector encountered, this may be the closest to what you're looking for, but each option has its specific purpose which is well explained in the description field).


@lordsmurf :

The best disc recovery is payware ISOBuster or freeware ISO Puzzle.
For HDD recovery, Stellar Phoenix or Ontrack.

Those tools don't serve quite the same purpose. There are cloning / imaging / extracting softwares, which attempt to transfer as much data as possible from one device to another, and there are analysis / recovery softwares, which thoroughly analyse the data structure and attempt to make sense of a corrupted file system. Stellar Phoenix and Ontrack Easy Recovery are full-blown data recovery softwares, which fall in the second category. The one I would recommend in that category is R-Studio – highly efficient for its relatively moderate price, and constantly improving. Recuva is not as powerful but is still excellent for a freeware (sometimes it performs better than other commercial alternatives). But it is not recommended to directly analyse a defective storage device with such a software : its condition can worsen at each access attempt, while not a single byte is actually recovered (= transfered to a healthy device) during the analysis step, which typically lasts several hours on a large capacity HDD (for instance, about 7-8 hours for the complete scan of a healthy 4TB HDD). Therefore the safest approach is to first create a clone or image file of the device with a dedicated tool, designed to handle bad sectors as carefully as possible, skipping areas which contain too many of them, so as to get the easily accessible data first, before attempting to extract as much data as possible from the damaged areas during subsequent passes (while regular cloning/imaging softwares will attempt to read every single byte sequentially and freeze if a large chunk of bad sectors is encountered), and then analyse the clone / image file with a recovery software, or several.
To extract as much data as possible as safely as possible from a defective storage device of any kind, but particularly HDDs, two excellent Linux-based tools : ddrescue (CLI), HDDSuperClone (GUI). Both are contained on this Lubuntu-based live CD, custom-made by the author of the latter.
To extract individual files from a damaged storage device of any kind (not only optical discs) on Windows : Roadkil Unstoppable Copier (freeware).

[FLP437]

There is also a very interesting tool named TestDisk, an OpenSource software that continues to be actively developed and that is very effective for the situations / problems covered.

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

I used spinrite several times in the past and it was a very good tool ,but 4 years ago I had a disk crash and in the occasion I tested several tools spinrite included also commercial ones but was with this tool, testdisk that I was able to recovery all information from the damaged disk . However it took almost a week to squeeze all the information to the last bit.

[abolibibelot]

TestDisk is aimed at fixing logical issues, like lost / reformatted partitions. It has an option to create an image file of a storage volume, which is highly recommended in case of physical issues, but it's not optimized to deal with damaged devices, like ddrescue or HDDSuperClone. However, TestDisk can open a raw image volume created by either of those dedicated tools : on a Windows system, either by right-clicking on the image file, choosing “Open with”, and looking for the TestDisk executable, or by typing a command from the command prompt (see below) ; another option is to mount the image file with a third-party tool, like OSFMount.

"X:\path to TestDisk\testdisk.exe" "X:\path to the image file\name of the image file.dd"

The companion program Photorec is designed to perform a “raw” file search and extraction, for cases where the metadata information has been completely lost. It's quite efficient at what it does (it's been favorably compared with very expensive forensic softwares), but it should be used as a last resort (or as a complimentary procedure), because files recovered that way are no longer organized, the file names are lost (each extracted file is named after its first sector number), the directory structure is lost, the timestamps and attributes are lost, and in the case of fragmented files, even if each fragment is still accessible on the source device, the algorithm (which does not rely on the filesystem metadata) is unable to guess their correct locations and sequence, so the resulting file is bound to be incomplete, partially or totally unreadable. Also, in my experience, its algorithm gets easily confused by false-positives, i.e. random false signatures of one file type found inside a valid file of another type, for instance, if it finds what seems to be a JPG signature (FF D8 FF) at a sector boundary inside of a valid MP4 file, it truncates the extracted MP4 file (which may therefore end up totally unreadable if its index / moov atom is located at the end) and extracts an invalid JPG file ; so I would recommend to use it to recover as few file types as possible at once (by unchecking the others in the options), instead of using the default settings (with most common and no-so-common file types checked).
(Photorec can also analyse a volume image with the same methods as described above for TestDisk.)

This is a more sophisticated file carver, which is supposed to successfully recover fragmented files when the filesystem metadata is badly damaged, I don't know how efficient it is, but while we're on the topic of mentioning various tools for various scenarios of data recovery cases, this may be useful to someone at some point :
https://www.klennet.com/carver/

[lingyi]

I was just responding to a post in another forum about SpinRite and it seems it may not be completely dead as I came across Gibson's new blog and his post from April 18, 2019:

He says he busy with his pet project, SQRL (Secure, Quick, Reliable, Login) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQRL and will eventually get around updating SpinRite to 6.1 (actually 7.0).

"Long time SpinRite fans are pretty much furious with me for allowing SpinRite to remain untouched and un-updated for 15 years. I get that. Believe me… I really really really do get that. And I truly cannot wait to be able to return to work on SpinRite. But as you will see once you become familiar with SQRL, it really does solve the problem of using secrets (passwords) and usernames or email, to sign-in to websites."

"Once SQRL has been officially released I will immediately be returning to work on v6.1 of SpinRite. The best true apology I can offer is not to call the next version v7.0 an ask for an upgrade fee, but to instead call it v6.1 and make it a free upgrade for all v6.0 owners… even for those who purchased v6.0 15 years ago in 2004 when it was finished and released."

"I plan to post updates here on my status and on what’s going on, not only about SQRL but also about SpinRite v6.1… and anything else that I think needs saying."

Source: https://blog.grc.com/

[TreeTops]

That's good news.

[Leo2u]

Would it be cool to see an update, when the release of new SQRL?