[Beavis]

this is a post by admin.




Best Recommendation!

I have checked around and the best recommendation we can make to recover files from a failing hard drive is SpinRite from GRC.com.

KickstartNews reviewed SpinRite v6.0 that seems to be very much like your condition:
The opportunity for the first test appeared only one day after we received our copy of version 6. An 80GB hard drive on one of our busy storage servers decided to pack it in. Prior to trying SpinRite we were still able to access the drive intermittently but it was impossible to copy data or run a file undelete utility. A handful of important files had been written to the drive subsequent to the last backup the previous night; files which we needed within about 48 hours, which meant that a professional data recovery service (with its three week backlog) was out of the question. We removed the drive and installed it in an identical hardware configuration, then booted SpinRite 6 from CD and did a Level 2 recovery (see above for recovery level definitions). After 22 hours, SpinRite completed its work and pronounced the drive fully recovered. We reinstalled the drive in the original server. It ran perfectly, the research assistant who had created the required files copied them off the drive and that was that. Nice job SpinRite 6. The drive was still running fine as we went to publication with this review two weeks after the incident. We used a level 2 setting in SpinRite: Recover Unreadable Data.

This can perform a rebuild of the data, as well as an analysis of the "health" of the hard drive.

GRC.com is Gibson Research Corp. owned and run by Steve Gibson. Steve is one of the "keepers of the Internet"... a white hat man who consults for NSA, CIA, FBI and the likes. He has incredible knowledge of how things work. SpinRite is $89.00 for a new buyer, or less if you have a prior version. If it recovers your 13,000 files, it's worth ever penny. Here are more testimonials if the one above didn't convince you.