Ever had a hard drive crash? Probably didn't back up your files like you told yourself you would, did you? Sucks when you have to wipe your hard drive clean and reinstall the Operating System or send your computer into Best Buy and have them send you a brand new one with none of your old files.
Never again! As hard drive capacity get larger and larger, they are most more and more prone to errors. While you sleep, eat, surf the web, your computer is constantly running, creating write errors, and moving sectors around on the hard drive. A genius known as Steve Gibson created some software named SpinRite that can solve your hard drive problems.
Stop by www.grc.com/spinrite and check out the testimonials and reviews. See it for yourself. It can be bought for $90 and is worth every penny. Realize if your hard drive fails and is unreadable by the operating system, that does not mean it is a hunk of worthless steel. It may just need to have a few sectors here and there cleaned and moved. SpinRite reads each sector, each bit, each cluster and performs a heavy scrub with 5 different layers of cleaning. I have corrected many hard drives that have failed. I had one that kept failing and freezing my computer. I thought my computer was done for. Ran SpinRite, it crunched through the bits, corrected a few, and all was back to normal. Now I must note that SR runs using the BIOS which Mac's do not have. SR also typically cannot be run on USB drives however there are workarounds detailed in the forums. I am currently waiting on an adapter so I can plug in my 3G ipod drive into my PC to run SR and clean it up. It is constantly failing and resetting and I have a good chance it needs a bit of scrubbing. I will give you a heads up later if it works.
BTW - Steve has a podcast on security, privacy, cryptography, and sprinrite on http://www.twit.tv/. Check it out. Long live the twit army!
UPDATE: I have been running SpinRite on a 30 Gig HD for over a week now. It is 58% complete with quite a few lost sectors of data. I had to let my computer take break and halted the process. I am now running it on a 3G iPOD which had a failed HD. I had to purchase a few adapters to connect it via IDE (see http://www.addonics.com/) but it is off and running and is looking good so far. Lots of defective sectors but about 10% in and all have been recovered.
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