[LinuxUsers] advice on "dcfldd:/dev/sda: input/output error" ?

[Jeff Lasman]

On Monday 16 February 2009 12:59 pm, David Kaiser wrote:

> I used to use Spinrite version 5 or something back in the early to
> mid 90's.  It was able to recover almost every bad block (we used to
> say bad sector back then)

The most recent version is 4-1/2 years old:

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

> I can't use Spinrite anymore because it won't work with IDE or SATA
> drives, it only worked with drives where it could directly access the
> drive - no translation like IDE or SATA put on top of the physical
> drive.

According to the page cited above, it should work; it uses MSDOS or 
FreeDOS.  The way it works is it picks up data that's only marginally 
readable; it keeps retrying until it gets it, and then it writes it 
down again.  Supposedly that's supposed to fix drives.

Jeff
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