The “Break it Down” Blog

A friend this week had her laptop give her the dreaded blue screen every time she booted. After a trip to the Theif Geek Squad who told her if would be $1500+ to recover the data from the drive, I gave SpinRite a try first. I booted to the disk and ran a level 2 recovery scan. In a couple of hours it found a bunch of hits. Rebooted to the hard drive and presto, back up and running. After schooling her on how to back up data and doing so, I ran a higher level scan that found a bunch more errors. And now she is back up and fully functional.

SpinRite is a standalone disk diagnostic and recovery tool which works at the bit level rather than the file system level. It uses the SMART system on hard drive to it full extent to recover the data on the drive.

Here’s an interview with the creator, who gives some great information on the product and hard drive functions.