Originally Posted By: StevieC
Originally Posted By: PandaBear
Originally Posted By: StevieC
I use a program called Spinrite and it works great for recovering crashed disc's and/or running maintenance on them to prevent data loss. It checks each sector for integrity by checking the voltage at which the magnetic pick-up reads/writes to that spot on the drive.
Every generation of hard drive from different vendor has their own implementation of the analog side of the signals. There is no generic tool that can actually get to the voltage or the magnetic side of the signals.
The data magnetic field is picked up by the head, then amplified by the pre-amp, and decoded by the "channel" of the ASIC. The channel break down the data between servo and the contents. The servo data will tells the DSP how to regulate the spindle and position the actuator, and the data will be decoded into contents that are sectors. Then it is passed through ECC, caching, data reordering, and sent back to the host (PC).
All of the above are proprietary, or collaboration between different vendors/customers/competitors. Spinrite at most will only read raw data to perform ECC on statistics, and I doubt they can even get to the raw data and be able to decode it without manufacture's help.
From what I read on their website, they either rely on file system knowledge or statistical analysis to recreate some of the data.
10+ Years using the software, never had a hard disk failure or data-loss. When friends have had Data-Loss I have always been able to recover their data... This in my opinion speaks for itself.
Dude, my 8088 still has it's original hard drive
It's now more than 20 years old!