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Click Death will get YOU! Life After
(click) Death		 Click Death will get YOU!

The following short collection of notes were addressed to me, and are shared with you with the full permission and knowledge of their authors ...

I heard about your product from the people at Symantec. I e-mailed them to find out if Norton Utilties could recover data on a formatted Zip disk. I guess not since they told me to come here. This sounds too good to be true. I've read your site, checked out reviews and asked others what they thought. This seems like a better alternative than buying a new drive.

Trent Lytle

I wrote back to Trent, asked him for permission to post his note (above) on this page, and told him that while I can't guarantee exactly what SpinRite 5.0 would do in his case, that we WOULD guarantee that he wanted to keep it after purchasing it, by gladly refunding his purchase if he wasn't completely satisfied with his results. (No one ever asks for their money back after they experience SpinRite in action.)

Hi Steve.

Thank you for sending me your program SR5-Beta. It took some time to send you any feedback because my zipdrive was for six weeks in repair. (They replaced the old one.)

This program was able to access 7 of my 13 zip disks. After I used SpinRite I was able to read my directories again. Its a pity I can not get any access to the other 6 of the zipdisks. It's giving me the message that SpinRite is having unexpected trouble accessing the zipdrive. Do you know any other solution?

Dirk de Graaf

I wrote back and told Dirk that I was delighted to hear he'd been able to recover more than half of his dead disks and that I hope to soon have a solution for bringing those others back from the grave. He's going to send some of them to me to help with that research.

To: 'Steve Gibson'
Subject: SpinRite 5.0 and Click Death ... continued.

Steve,
Sorry for the delay in my reply. I have several (6 I believe) zip disks which are unreadable from even SpinRite 5.0. Of the 7 bad disks which I had, only 1 of them could it read. It did an excellent job of recovery from this one. I would welcome testing any software you have which speaks to the problem of the disk not being recognized by the OS. To a lesser extent, I would welcome the opportunity to send these disks to you to play with.
Thank you,
Denis Burke CNE, MCSE
Manager of Information Systems

The problem Denis mentions above, where SpinRite fixes the dead disks that it can "see", but can't help the ones which are being taken "offline" by the disk drive itself, will be one of the main thrusts of my research. The other question to answer is WHY is this happening at all? What EXACTLY is going on here?

I hope to develop a small stand-alone utility that will be able to bring those really dead offline disks back online so that SpinRite will then be able to work its magic. (Which has now been shown to be effective and useful so long as the disk is accessible.)

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