After dropping Windows for Ubuntu, I noticed there was something quite peculiar about my new taskbar. A warning message, right after installation, notified me of an issue with my laptop. Granted, I am currently using a very old laptop (a.k.a “The Tank”), a Dell D610, pretty outdated, but very robust and working like new. I was certain that the notification Ubuntu was giving was going to be about some missing software packages or required updates.

I was shocked to read that there was an issue with my hard drive disk. A lot of end users live day after day, saving important information on their computers and don’t stop to think about what would happen if everything was lost. I admit that these days it is less likely to happen, with online storage applications such as DropBox, but it still does happen. Anyway, I had a LOT of bad sectors on my hard drive and Ubuntu apparently picked up on it. Strange, that Microsoft XP did not alert me on this? It turns out Windows’ ScanDisk (created as a result of users turning the power off of their PCs without properly shutting down) just removes any unreadable sectors from the file system. No recovery or surface analysis is performed by ScanDisk, which would in this case keep the current hard drive problem alive.

The timing was perfect for this kind of troubleshooting, as a good friend of mine was talking with me about an application called SpinRite (by the Gibson Research Corporation)  the week before. In it’s 6th release, SpinRite is a very low priced application which enables you to perform a deep scan of your hard drive and fix bad sectors.  An extremely handy feature of SpinRite is that it is completely independent of any operating system. Except for solid state drives (like USB keys, which “might” work with the product) you can pretty much run SpinRite on any computer.

I think that the interface should be redone, but with the previous feature mentioned it would be tough to build something platform independent. Perhaps an improved interface using Java would be possible. Despite the un-impressive interface there are still some pretty cool real-time feedback screens, like the graphic status display which reminds me of the disk defragmenter in Windows (this feature is not a part of SpinRite), and RealTime activities which display the partition status and current activity at a low level.

There are some neat tricks performed by this software that control the head of the hard disk reader. One of these is the hard disk head repositioning, which locates the bad sector and tries to read it at different places within margin to get a perfect reading in the case of data recovery. In addition, sometimes hard drives will replace defective sector with spare sectors which render the trouble sector irreplaceable. SpinRite works around this by disabling this feature, making it easier for it to analyze all bad sectors.

There is a lot of extensive documentation and videos online about SpinRite. It definitely did the trick for me, and saved me the trouble of looking for a new hard drive or even purchasing another laptop, which is why it makes the list on my “Saving Serious Cash with Software” line of articles!

http://www.grc.com/sr/themovie.htm

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