SpinRite

Come on, Jow Forums can pirate anything.

No. You could potentially hack it up with hdparm, but it's sufficiently voodoo and dangerous that I don't think anyone's bothered.

Reads sectors, asking the firmware to report errors, then perform repeated rereads on sectors with errors (along with some requested seeks around to hopefully move the voice coils) - this is something the drive firmware doesn't normally try on its own. If it gets at least two identical successful reads, it will write the sector and specifically mark the sector as bad (and thus cause the bad sector to be remapped and the data, or at least SOME of the data, hopefully restored - the integrity of the data is not assured).

Gibson talks it up a bit. It's not magical. It's not possible on any modern drive (and by this I mean anything post MFM/RLL) to bypass the error-correction and do it manually, but this is probably the closest you can get on non-SMR spinning rust to the kind of scrubbing that a good filesystem could do: with no checksums, this kind of Hamming-weight guesswork is all you've got.

It's analogous to what Exact Audio Copy's secure mode tries to do with CDs (which have much weaker ECC).

Note the majority of modern drive failures are actually controller board failures and software could do nothing for that (unless, maybe, you taught it how to reflash the drive controllers but that is more NSA territory than usual data recovery).

Steve please.

Can I have that answer in more accessible terminology? That sounded extremely fucking interesting but I lack the education to understand it.

Nobody mentions it because its a fucking placebo for fags. Get with the program.

There is free software to do this.

It's highly extensible and you can fuck with the sector maps and pipe anything into anything.

But you can keep being a nonfree pleb who hast to trust binaries that reallocate sectors in a DOS environment.

And you can invoke read_Long to pull sector and ECC data manually.

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To put in bluntly: Spinrite is snake oil. It hasn't been updated in almost 15 years. It still "works" with everything included SSDs. That's simply not possible unless it was virtually doing nothing to begin wtih as it effectively predates virtually every modern form of storage media. It claims to fuck with "magneto" levels on hard drives. If you read GRCs own research docs, its 100% made up grade A bullshit.

grc.com/srphysics.htm

It's snake oil, essentially. Linux and Windows have the tools built into them to recover drives already. Plus it doesn't work larger drives as Steve "gibsmedat" Gibson can't be bothered to update it.

For a good several screens I was thinking it was a parody.

>placebo
How can it be a placebo if it actually works?

The sheer time it takes to 'recover' 1+TB drives makes it not feasible in current year

Can I run spinrite on SSDs?

You shouldn't.

It was awhile ago, so I forget the details, but basically friends computer stopped booting, plugged hard drive into my computer and was able to restore maybe half the files, then ran spinrite, but made no difference, no new files were saved. HDD was def. Disappointing since that was the entire reason I bought the thing. Everyone raves about it

I think only on level 2 other levels will rewrite the whole disk