Ignoring empty sectors while recovering.

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jedimasterspaz

New member
Jan 1, 2023
3
1
I have a drive that Spinrite spends a lot of time doing recovery on empty sectors.
Can I get Spinrite 6.1 to ignore or move past empty sectors without doing any recovery?
 
No, not selectively, not 'intelligently'.

SpinRite is a DRIVE tool, and is agnostic to the 'meaning'
of any file system, operating system, or data on the drive.

Besides, some folks may WANT data back that is in
supposedly empty areas of a drive, and that's what they
may be running SpinRite for.

For the quickest DRIVE maintenance, first backup/clone
our data, then run:


SPINRITE NORAMTEST LEVEL 2 DYNASTAT 0​
or
SPINRITE NORAMTEST LEVEL 3 DYNASTAT 0​

Level 2 will rewrite only incompletely read sectors.

Level 3 will rewrite the entire drive.

DynaStat 0 will spend 0 zero time recovering unreadable
sectors, and simply cause them to be rewritten as is,
usually causing the drive to reallocate a bad sector to a
new, fully responsive sector.
 
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Note, for NTFS-formatted partitions, WE can use the free
Microsoft NFI.EXE program:

... to check sectors from a SpinRite log to see what file -
or blank space - they belong to:


NTFS File Sector Information Utility.​
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1999. ​
All rights reserved. Dumps information ​
about an NTFS volume, and optionally ​
determines which volume and file contains ​
a particular sector.​

Usage: ​
​
nfi drive-letter [logical-sector-number]​

Drive-letter can be a single character ​
or a character followed by a colon ​
(i.e., C or C: are acceptable). ​
Logical-sector-number is a decimal or ​
0x-prefixed hex number, specifying a ​
sector number relative to the volume​
whose drive letter is given by ​
drive-letter. If not specified, then ​
information about every file on the ​
volume is dumped.​
​
nfi NT-device-path physical-sector-number​

Determines which volume a given ​
physical sector on a drive is within, ​
and then which file on the volume it ​
is in. NT-device-path is the NT-style ​
path to a physical device. It must not ​
include a partition specification.​
Physical-sector-number is a decimal or ​
0x-prefixed hex number, specifying a ​
sector number relative to the physical​
drive whose device path is given by ​
NT-device-path.​
​
nfi full-win32-path​
​
Dumps information about a particular ​
file. full-win32-path must start with ​
a drive letter and a colon.​
 
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