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by KyeRussell 2885 days ago
As someone that develops almost exclusively in high-level languages on top of may levels of abstraction, it's nice to see what can be accomplished close to the metal.

This reminds me of Steve Gibson's SpinRite, which (from what I recall) is a fully functional disk recovery utility written entirely in assembly. https://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm. Say what you want about the man, but this is something that's saved me on at least one occasion, and is smaller than things I produce that do a lot lot less.
1 comments
jjeaff 2885 days ago
There are people that will argue until they are blue in the face that his recovery software is useless.

But I have also had some success with it.

Everything that he releases is amazingly tiny. It just shows how much bloat modern software tends to have.

link
exikyut 2884 days ago
What I've read is that SpinRite simply just reads and writes to the disk, triggering the disk firmware to reallocate bad sectors. I think it just tries to read many times, which can sometimes help.

The other argument is that the various things SR tries to "manage" (sector interleave, getting various timing parameters "perfect", etc) were only relevant with ST-506 (!!) and similar disks from the 80s/very early 90s, and that anything remotely modern (even IDE, virtually 100% of SATA) generally doesn't provide enough low-level control surface that trying to micro-manage the disk's behavior will do anything particularly special.

Of course, I'm sure each manufacturer has their own tools and widgets that can use undocumented proprietary SATA/SCSI commands to control the drive's behavior at a very low level, but those kinds of tools are a) rare as hens' teeth and b) probably very easy to break disks with due to poor UI design and lack of documentation. Chances are the most expensive data recovery centers probably have some of these tools, and more importantly the training to know how not to kill HDDs with them :P

TL;DR: Yes, SR works, but probably just as well as dd3rescue; as always, if you think a disk is this side of dead and you think you have a chance without specialized tools, just imaging it is probably the best first step, because SR and all other tools will of course stress it.

With all of this said, I really, really like SR's startup animation :3 and I agree that it's refreshingly small.

link