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Comment by ValentineC | Hacker News Reader

Many years ago, I made the mistake of using SpinRite once to try and recover a hard disk failing with bad sectors.

It was only through the process that I realised that instead of letting the hard disk run and get worse, I should have instead tried to image off all the data ASAP with ddrescue.

That was a very dear lesson in data loss.

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> I should have instead tried to image off all the data ASAP with ddrescue.

It's interesting since for those familiar with the claims of SpinRite and how 'it'll keep working as long as it takes to read a bad sector' (a key part of its promotion) ddrescue can do the same thing (and resume where it left off) but unlike SpinRite it's simultaneously making an image of the drive as it does so.

It usually gives you a very large warning that a drive is about to physically fail and advises you to try and backup the data if you haven't already.

But if you already knew the drive was damaged, why push it to the point when you can't possibly have the time to image it, which will take forever? Feels like advising somebody to push through their asthma until they're about to lose consciousness.

This. I naively thought that SpinRite could "fix" the bad sectors (forcing the drive controller to copy the data to a spare sector) and let me copy out of the data through a normal process after, but bad sectors are often an indicator of a larger mechanical issue.

Did your disk get worse as a result of running Spinrite? My understanding is that the author and many people suggest using it to get the problematic drive work better, and be able to read data it couldn't read before. According to testimonials online, this sometimes does succeed. Of course, it can also cause the drive to get worse or fail completely. But we don't have statistics data to determine which outcome is more probable, so it would be unfair to denounce the advice or the author (as some people do) just because the advice didn't work to user's satisfaction in their particular case. I agree that Spinrite or any such program should, as the first step before doing anything risky, advise the user to try to make an image of the disk and save it to another reliable disk.

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