[kwlug-disc] Media errors on a USB disk

[Eric Gerlach]

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Andrew Sullivan Cant
<acant at alumni.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> I have not tried SpinRite so I don't know what additional magic it might do.

If a block is bad it reads it thousands of times with no error
correction on then performs a statistical analysis to find out what
the data most likely was before the block went wonky.  It uses
different techniques (like seeking to various cylinders before
reading) to try to get good reads.  It's pretty thorough.

Won't help you through a head crash though.  My friend found that out
the hard way.

Cheers,

Eric