Is SpinRite a scam? Is S.G. a charlatan? People have accused Steve Gibson of being a charlatan and his SpinRite software of being little more than a scam. As you may or may not know S.G. is working on an update for the SpinRite DOS software, SpinRite 6.1. This has been a process that has… Read More »
Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy Okay, this is another one that annoys me: The claim, the myth that certain three letter agencies can recover data from erased or zero filled hard drives. The claim that those can magically ‘read’ and reconstruct data from ‘latent magnetic residue’ (I am not making this up,… Read More »
A passport is how a drive ID’s itself. This simple utility tries, via various methods to determine a drive’s ID and serial number. Sometimes it is for example useful to know which hard drive is actually used inside a USB external drive enclosure (external hard drive). For example to learn if the drive is a… Read More »
Recovering data from an unstable flash drive often proves to be a lot harder than recovering data that was lost due to deletion or accidental formatting. This is due to the fact that data recovery software is written to address issues at the ‘data level’ while often instability issues are at the ‘disk level’. What… Read More »
I am all for DIY (do it yourself). In fact my first website was called ‘DIY Data Recovery’, and the idea was to provide people with information and tools to perform their own data recoveries. I learned a few things from that. Some things are not suited for DIY’ing. And some things that are DIY-able,… Read More »
It often goes like this. Your PC is acting weird, sluggish. You can’t put your finger on it. Someone, maybe in an online forum, suggests you may have hard disk problems. The term bad sectors is used. Windows Event Viewer may refer to a bad block. It is then suggested to look at the disk’s… Read More »
Just a quick heads up, beta for HD Sentinel 5.01.5 is available here: www.hdsentinel.com/beta5/hdsentinel_pro_setup_5015-jjmfl.zip – detection of NVMe SSD status when Intel chipset RAID controller driver installed: detect complete status of standalone NVMe SSDs and NVMe SSDs configured as RAID (Intel Z270 chipset) – added detection of complete disk status when ASMEDIA ASM1352R external USB… Read More »
Online Community Support Forums and data recovery advice I like helping people when it comes to disk and data loss related problems. A few decades ago I was a frequent visitor and contributor of hard disk related Usenet newsgroups, for example “comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage”. And more recently I decided to spent a little time on this hobby… Read More »
We give away 10 lifetime HD Sentinel Pro licenses (value $29.95)! We’ll give away a license every 10 likes! Ended! As we have 10 licenses to give away, we reached out goal! We will draw winners later today and announce them on our FB page. Thank you all!!!! What do you have to do? Visit… Read More »
Using DiskPatch you can repair bad sectors very much like a utility like Spinrite but without the hocus-pocus-factor. Hard disk diagnostics using SMART DiskPatch (DIY DataRecovery.nl) includes a S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic utility. Since DiskPatch runs from a boot USB key it can even check disk health if the PC fails to boot. To create a DiskPatch… Read More »