Hard Drive Recovery and Reliability

A free (OSS) tool to restore partitions and attempt to recover files. Highly rated on the slashdot thread.
- http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
- http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/06/02/1332222
Lost Partition Table: I had a computer whose hard drive seemed to be detected in BIOS, but not in a Knoppix or Ubuntu bootable CD (in hindsight should have booted to GParted or similar low level tool). GParted said unallocated space. Tried TestDisk (via Hirens Boot CD) and it said the partition sector was messed up - it fixed it.
mhdd (it's on the UBCD) connects to drives at low level for scanning.
- can scan drive for "slow" sectors and flag them. Interesting...
- "ERASE" command seemed to work on damaged disks that other tools couldn't.

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SD Card Recovery

Apparently SD cards have two modes. Normal and "SPI" mode, some kind of serial thing, it might work if SD mode doesn't. Guy uses an Arduino to do it: http://tech.tiefpunkt.com/2013/08/sd-card-recovery-using-an-arduino/

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Neat web page listing the recommended hard drives, written by a hard drive recovery service: http://www.driveservice.com/bestwrst.htm

Great thread, 2013-12, on consumer vs enterprise drives. Reliability is about even mechanically, firmware is more suitable on enterprise for RAID. - http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/12/04/1726254/for-first-three-years-consumer-hard-drives-as-reliable-as-enterprise-drives

SSD + Power protection - this guy tested a few drives, only Intel SSD's could survive any power outage. http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_analysis.html - http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/12/27/208249/power-loss-protected-ssds-tested-only-intel-s3500-passes - 2013-12.

tags: hard drive, disk, repair, fix, problems, TestDisk, crash