What is the intended function of NOREWRITE ?
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The argument has been made that when SpinRite is unable, despite all of its recovery attempts, to obtain a perfect full recovery of a sector, it should not, after giving up, rewrite that sector with whatever data (or none) that it may have been able to obtain before giving up.
The reason for this is that in rewriting a seriously damaged sector to restore it for future use, whatever data had been there will be lost forever. If the sector simply cannot be read, one might wonder why it would be left as-is... and the reason proposed is that there are expensive premium data recovery services that specialize in attempting the recovery of such data. They offer no guarantees (which is understandable) and they are generally quite expensive... but if some data on a drive is utterly irreplaceable -- like your cryptocurrency wallet cannot be read -- then it might be worth dropping a few thousand dollars to let a formal recovery company take a crack at it.
Generally, the place where such companies are useful is not in “unreadable sector” recovery -- there's really not that much they can do on today's drives -- but they can be VERY useful when, for example, the drive's circuit board goes bad and the entire drive goes offline. In that situation these companies, which typically maintain a exhaustive collection of old drives, are often able to bring a drive back online to have its data recovered.
SpinRite has always traditionally, rewritten sectors whose data cannot be fully recovered, but v6.1 adds this “norewrite” option in case someone might wish to try again in the future or in case it might be worth escalating recovery to a data recovery specialist company after SpinRite has done everything it can.
The reason for this is that in rewriting a seriously damaged sector to restore it for future use, whatever data had been there will be lost forever. If the sector simply cannot be read, one might wonder why it would be left as-is... and the reason proposed is that there are expensive premium data recovery services that specialize in attempting the recovery of such data. They offer no guarantees (which is understandable) and they are generally quite expensive... but if some data on a drive is utterly irreplaceable -- like your cryptocurrency wallet cannot be read -- then it might be worth dropping a few thousand dollars to let a formal recovery company take a crack at it.
Generally, the place where such companies are useful is not in “unreadable sector” recovery -- there's really not that much they can do on today's drives -- but they can be VERY useful when, for example, the drive's circuit board goes bad and the entire drive goes offline. In that situation these companies, which typically maintain a exhaustive collection of old drives, are often able to bring a drive back online to have its data recovered.
SpinRite has always traditionally, rewritten sectors whose data cannot be fully recovered, but v6.1 adds this “norewrite” option in case someone might wish to try again in the future or in case it might be worth escalating recovery to a data recovery specialist company after SpinRite has done everything it can.
...or an end user might want to use a "Free" program like ddrescue or hddsuperclone to make a full sector-by-sector copy of their failing drive allowing the programs to re-read those sectors over and over again, after they get all the healthy sectors imaged, until they get the data read, they give up or the drive quits.
'NoRewrite' seems to work...
Sector 8,705 (0.0017%) This sector could not be completely recovered and 'NoRewrite' prevents its partial recovery and/or repair.
Sector 8,706 (0.0017%) This sector could not be completely recovered and 'NoRewrite' prevents its partial recovery and/or repair.
Sector 8,707 (0.0017%) This sector could not be completely recovered and 'NoRewrite' prevents its partial recovery and/or repair.
Other log events...
Sector 48,960,716 (10.0247%) ALL DATA was completely recovered from this damaged sector.
Sector 48,960,728 (10.0247%) ALL DATA was completely recovered from this damaged sector.
Sector 48,960,874 (10.0248%) After a minor problem reading this sector occurred and a repeated attempt succeeded, this sector has been re-written.
Sector 8,705 (0.0017%) This sector could not be completely recovered and 'NoRewrite' prevents its partial recovery and/or repair.
Sector 8,706 (0.0017%) This sector could not be completely recovered and 'NoRewrite' prevents its partial recovery and/or repair.
Sector 8,707 (0.0017%) This sector could not be completely recovered and 'NoRewrite' prevents its partial recovery and/or repair.
Other log events...
Sector 48,960,716 (10.0247%) ALL DATA was completely recovered from this damaged sector.
Sector 48,960,728 (10.0247%) ALL DATA was completely recovered from this damaged sector.
Sector 48,960,874 (10.0248%) After a minor problem reading this sector occurred and a repeated attempt succeeded, this sector has been re-written.
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