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Re:Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web? by wholinator2 on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @10:02AM (#30086282)
Might be a long shot, but GRCs Spinrite has saved a couple drives of mine. It won't work if there's a problem with the physical connection to the drive but almost everything else it can fix (at least momentarily) and actually grants a nice speed boost in the process for drives that have gotten too messy.
Re:Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web? by dsl on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @04:55PM (#30092524)
Aside from all the flashy handwavy marketing "technospeak" what SpinRite actually does under the hood is re-read each bit from the disk thousands of times and then see if it gets more 0s or 1s.

It works well when a drive is past the point where its internal error correction code no longer works, but you just want to beat the right answer out of it with a baseball bat.

These days professional disk recovery by a lab is sub-$1000 and they recommend not using brute force tools like Spinrite because it can also exacerbate the problem before they get hands on it.