RSS 2.0NTFS recovery with SpinRite
Some more corrupted sectors appeared on the same disk mentioned in
this earlier post. Once again, the Windows recovery console was no
help as it would just hang but I could access the disk after booting
Linux and found the corrupted sectors using badblocks. I pulled the
sectors off, as I'd done before, using ddrescue utility. Since the
last failure was less than 6 months ago and there may be more failures
to come I decided that paying $89 for GRC's SpinRite was more than
justified.
What a fabulous utility! It was pretty easy to get up and running after downloading and burning a boot disk. I initially had a problem with the laptop CPU overheating and shutting down. This happened when SpinRite was trying to recover some lost sectors and vexing the CPU. Moving the laptop too a cooler location on top of a fridge did the trick.
It took a few hours to run through the disk and recover the sectors,
where possible. I then rebooted in the Windows recovery console and
ran chkdsk. Job done!
At the same time I ran SpinRite over my aging Dell C400's 80GB
drive. This laptop is now used as a Linux MythTV frontend and has been
making a few noises sounding a little like seek errors in the making.
The hard disk was running a little hot during the scan which resulted
in some temperature warnings SpinRite. Moving the laptop into the
fridge solved the cooling problem and the scan continued
uninterrupted. SpinRite found and recovered a few bad sectors on the
ext3 partition and I have yet to hear the noise again.
posted by James Gemmell on Sun, 07 Feb 2010 at 17:21 | permalink
