Recuva is not as powerful but is still excellent for a freeware (sometimes it performs better than other commercial alternatives). The one I would recommend in that category is R-Studio – highly efficient for its relatively moderate price, and constantly improving.
Stellar Phoenix and Ontrack Easy Recovery are full-blown data recovery softwares, which fall in the second category.
There are cloning / imaging / extracting softwares, which attempt to transfer as much data as possible from one device to another, and there are analysis / recovery softwares, which thoroughly analyse the data structure and attempt to make sense of a corrupted file system. Those tools don't serve quite the same purpose.
#SPINRITE 6. ISO#
The best disc recovery is payware ISOBuster or freeware ISO Puzzle.įor HDD recovery, Stellar Phoenix or Ontrack. it also has a “disk repair” option which does a read scan but forces the reallocation of any bad sector encountered, this may be the closest to what you're looking for, but each option has its specific purpose which is well explained in the description :
#SPINRITE 6. MANUAL#
replaced by a sector from the “spare” area while its contents get lost in the process).įor testing purposes I would recommend HD Sentinel : constantly checks the SMART status of all connected drives, issues warnings (visual or audible) whenever there's a new issue on either of them, or if temperature goes too high, keeps logs over time, also allows to perform a variety of manual surface scans (read only / write only / read + write + read. it does nothing more than the drive's own firmware routines when attempting to overwrite a potentially damaged sector – either the sector can be written to and is thus removed from the “pending” list, or it can't and then it gets reallocated, i.e. It does not recover one single byte as it is proceeding, and its claims of “repairing” bad sectors are dubious at best (i.e. Spinrite is considered as dangerous by data recovery experts (do a search on for instance).
#SPINRITE 6. FULL#
it did a full recovery of the data on the drive. I know there are detractors that say that SpinRite wasn't as effective as it claimed, but the closest I've come is HDD Regenerator and I haven't used it since (years ago) it failed where SpinRite succeeded, i.e. **Don't do this! I did it when HDDs were much more expensive and IMO it's not worth the risk now. If the caution is red, definitely toss the drive. *I'm the first to advocate tossing or using for non-critical temp files if Crystaldiskinfo gives a yellow caution. If not, I'd partition out the portion of the drive that was bad (usually the beginning of the drive) and create another partition with the remainder.** It really doesn't matter with current HDD prices so low*, but I used to rerun SpinRite just to see if new bad sectors developed. Yeah, probably "I want what no one else does." And has a graphical interface with realtime monitoring so I can look under the hood while the program is running.
#SPINRITE 6. SOFTWARE#
Software that's pay once, keep forever, that I can keep in my software toolbox.
I should have been clearer about what I'm looking for.