SpinRite is valuable but "special"
I've probably done 20-30 recovery attempts over the years, and although I can't say that SpinRite is all-powerful magic, it has got some unique mojo, and it is a valuable "black-box" of a tool.
If you go to the SpinRite website, be prepared for a lot of mumbo-jumbo baloney. Even if your BS detector is turned down to "1", his web site will probably pin your needle. The author (Steve Gibson) has since fashioned himself into a well-know (but does not know well) Internet security blow-hard, who is really good at coming out with inflammatory quotes that the press loves, the kind that keep my dad from using the internet to this day.
Ignore your gut, and buy this tool the next time you get a disk that is still (mostly) readable, but is barfing half-way through the clone job. About a quarter to half the time Spin-Rite will "repair" the bad sectors so you can clone the darn thing before it dies.
Mr. Gibson claims it makes multiple reads of problematic areas, varying the framis, so that it can auto-magically extrapolate the who-zie-whatsit, and recover the bits. ...Whatever! Besides which it is totally old-school assembly language programming, with fun old-fashioned VGA blinkenLightsen fer du technischen peepers.
It has not been updated in years, and I still don't really know what it does, so that is why I call it a black-box. If Mr. Gibson were not so fond of fancy made-up terms for what his product does, and had gotten around to writing the documentation for the final version like his web site claims he would, we might know.
I'm going to check out the first tool in this list, but when you want a bootable disk back instead of just the files from it, SpinRite can make you feel like you are a HDD god.
Nobody else mentioned this, but I like the PMagic live CD better than the more popular Clonezilla. I've got version 14(?) of Norton Ghost, and the only advantage it has over the live CDs is that I can run it on my main Windows machine, and still use Windows while it is running. It is hard to use, not all that failure resilient, and has a bunch of "artificial" limitations that I can not figure out why. I prefer PMagic.
