A failed disk (pay for a professional service or SpinRite?)

Question

In my previous post (you don't need to read it, but it is Error “a disk read error occurred” on Windows XP), I said that my hard disk was not booting and is showing "a disk read error occurred". I took it to a recovery professional. A representative responded today told me that the NTFS partitions have an "NTFS partition system crash". I have no idea what that means. The engineer handling my drive will not be available for contact till tomorrow.

Now the company charges me NTD (New Taiwan Dollar) $16,000 to recover lost data. That's kind of a lot considering that my graduate student monthly stipend is currently NTD $32,000 (max. allowed by regulation, may be lower, may change depend on funding).

Now I'm weighting in between the options.

• Option A: let the professional recover it with the half of my monthly stipend. If file/directories I designated are not recovered I don't pay a penny (other than the initial examination fee of NTD $1000 which I've already paid.)

• Option B: let me try SpinRite. If it fails, back to Option A.

I spoke to the representative at the company, and they recommended me not to handle it on my own (yeah of course that's what they all want to say, right?), and at the price tag the disk error is probably relatively minor and data recoverable. But the representative really did not have detailed information of the disk failure, so I didn't take her recommendation readily. Though one thing I heed was that she said that what they would do is to duplicate the disk before attempting discovery, so there would be no data loss (Is this true? can't duplicating invoke further data loss?). That sounds very good to me.

Or maybe a third option:

• Option C: Negotiate with them to pay them to duplicate the disk hopefully for a much smaller price tag. Let me try SpinRite. If it fails, back to Option A.

This is a difficult decision. Ultimately I want my data back, but if a cheaper way is available to achieve the same thing...

Can operating with SpinRite also corrupt data in some way?

I've no idea what happened to my drive. I'll attempt to contact the engineer and hope to get it clarified and make an edit here.

---

EDIT:

After much negotiating and begging and seeing through promotion smoke screen, thanks to the nice representative who took my case, I now know that the engineer has already fixed my NTFS partition (I guess it might be a bad block in the partition table?). She told me that the problem was considered minor, and I should be able to boot normally and just copy stuff out.

Whew.. I'm glad I didn't agree to the NTD deal.

EDIT 2:

Thanks to all the help. I accepted Console's as it's most directly related to my question. But many suggestions were helpful and informational.

Answer 1

I recommended Spinrite in your previous thread. I've done some research on it before using it for the first time, and I can state that AFAIK it won't destroy your disk, unless the disk is in such a bad shape that just leaving it powered on causes degradation.

Spinrite only operates on bad clusters, so it can't destroy the good ones. I know that Steve Gibson found a unique way to operate on disk controllers, that AFAIK hasn't yet been understood even by the manufacturers themselves. As he keeps it secret, there's no way to know what it is. However, the way he manages to resuscitate hard disks is really magic.

I would recommend using Spinrite first. If it doesn't do anything, just ask for your money back. If the hard disk is mostly readable, except that the ntfs file system is irrecoverably destroyed, there are free tools that can recover files from such disks.

See the following thread : "Free NTFS partition recovery".
These tools will identify files on the damaged disk and will copy them elsewhere, so in no way are you modifying anything on the disk, and the option of using the services of a recovery professional stays viable.

Answer 2

Can operating with SpinRite also corrupt data in some way?

Yes. And so can the other suggested tools like HDD Regenerator.

Why running tools like SpinRite on a failing drive is a bad idea.

• First of all, there may be a underlying physical cause for the drive issues. Ideally this issue is addressed by a data recovery professional in a clean room. I understand not all data is worth that. Tools like SpinRite can not repair physical issues.

• If we can not address the physical issue, as a rule of thumb we try limit drive access as much as possible to avoid further damage. Tools like SpinRite actually access drives very intensively, so the exact opposite of what we want! SpinRite may try to access a specific area thousands of times to 'recover' data. The drive may simply stressed enough to 'die'.

• Even IF tools like SpinRite and HDD Regenerator claim to have successfully, unhealthy drives don't behave predictable and are know to return bogus data! See some examples below.

• Even IF tools like SpinRite manage to recover data correctly, they write the recovered data back to the same problematic drive! Assume a scenario where the drive dies after 80% of it's surface was scanned / 'repaired', we end up with 0% recover data.

The proper way to handle a failing drive.

As argued earlier, the best is to address physical issue first, but for now we assume this is deemed to expensive. The second argument is that we need to reduce stress on the drive as much as possible and data recovery specialists employ a simple techniques to accomplish this:

1. Any sector we can read, we copy to a known good drive or disk image
2. Skip over bad areas during initial pass
3. Process skipped areas, for example in reverse direction and abandon on error
4. During final pass try recover anything not read yet

If we use the same example of a drive failing after we read / scanned 80% of the data, we actually have written this data to another drive or disk image, unlike SpinRite like tools where at this point we'd have 0% of the data.

As a home user, we can use tools like ddrescue or HDDSuperClone that follow this protocol.

Examples of data 'recovered' by SpinRite and HDD Regenerator:

This sector was 'recovered' and repaired by SpinRite's Dynastat Data Recovery:

What is obvious is that the sector does look nothing like the data in the sector before and after it and it is unlikely it looks anything like the original data.

This sector was recover / repaired by HD regenerator:

As SpinRite, HDD Regenerator claims to restore the original sector data. In fact what we see if not the original data, we see part of the drive's firmware. For data recovery experts this is a well known phenomenon and the issue requires firmware repairs.

Answer 3

A professional data recovery procedure involves opening the drive in a "clean room", mounting the platters in a special machine that can read data that the drive head itself cannot. That way they can copy the drive before attempting any recovery and without risking that a flaw in the drive causes further damage.

Last I heard a quote for such an operation the price was over 10x as much as what your local company demands. (16000 Taiwan dollars seems to be about 350 euros?)

So what could that mean?

1) They will use a software tool of some kind to fix your partition. In this case, the price is understandable, but maybe you can find such a tool (or combination of tools) yourself for less than 16k? Don't know if spinrite can do it but perhaps others.

2) If they can copy the raw data without using special equipment, so can you. Even if the parition can't be mounted, you can use tools that copy the drive contents bit-by-bit, for example using "dd" from linux. That way you least have a copy of all the bits. Figuring out what files they are part of is another task.

3) Taiwan seems to be the promised land of tech, so perhaps they have ways to do professional clean room data recovery without charging arms and legs for it. ;)

Answer 4

I've had good luck with Spinrite recovering data for me in the past. However, my concern would be that just attempting to use Spinrite might decrease the probability of a professional shop being able to recover your data. So, you'd be great if Spinrite works, but if it fails, you might be worse off. If your data is truly that irreplaceable, you're probably going to have to spend the big $ and go straight to the shop to get the highest probability of recovery. :-(

Answer 5

Option D: HDD Regenerator. It is much better than SpinRite at half the price and has the same 'money back' policy.

If you mean by 'booting into Windows XP' using this drive actively, I would not recommend it, since it is an NTFS partition: Instead, I recommend a Windows live CD (for example, BartPE) instead of a Linux live CD.

Answer 6

SpinRite will help recover bad sectors, but if a sector is unrecoverable or the partition table is scrambled due to software error, SpinRite will do nothing for you.

Don't get me wrong, I own SpinRite and it is a fabulous tool. You just have to understand what it does and doesn't do.

SpinRite won't corrupt data, but it may get you to the point where you see just how much data you've lost.

Answer 7

I'd try SpinRite before an outside service. Remember their satisfaction guarantee, which is a 30 day no questions asked money back guarantee.

If that doesn't work, it's either serious hardware damage or software corruption... So make your choice of services then.