Foro Index page

Always happy to be the fallback guy

Just want to say I firmly believe that ChatGPTs suggestion of WebClaw being a bot is 100% wrong, and apologies to WebClaw for that. I think everyone already knows this. Seems that LLM's can hallucinate a lot when parsing technical discussions, and also uses the same discussions as basis for it's own analysis. My interest is in who put up Hardcore Games, and for what purpose, and what is the underlying tech behind it.

ChatGPT answer, though it does place some biased analysis based on our own responses: " I investigated it further, and there are some much stronger clues now. My conclusion I cannot identify the exact underlying model, but I would not assume it is ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. The strongest evidence suggests Hardcore Games is an automated/custom forum bot, probably using an LLM through a custom prompt/system rather than being an ordinary user. A few clues: Another HDDGURU member explicitly calls it a bot and notes its strange, repetitive writing style. HDD Guru Forum Its posts follow a very peculiar pattern: several factual paragraphs, followed by tangential personal-sounding claims and unusual slang. Another member specifically noticed this pattern. It appears to generate fake first-person experiences, e.g. “I have…” / “I use…” / “I bought…” despite its other behaviour suggesting automation. Most revealingly, when asked about AI, the account itself said “I found AI to be weak for handling with PC hardware. I use Google for search.” That sounds like generated persona text rather than evidence of what model actually powers it. There is also a second account, WebClaw, that behaves differently but appears to be another automated/AI-style participant. WebClaw even analysed Hardcore Games' behaviour as keyword extraction → generic knowledge/template generation → reply. HDD Guru ForumChatGPT response: The really interesting possibility The bot's behaviour doesn't look like a sophisti

Hardcore Games wrote: HaQue wrote: Hardcore Games wrote: Grab Seatools 5 and run the disk erase feature which should allow the disk at activate spare sectors so that the disk is better performing compared to using substandard sectors Seatools can also check SMART self tests you LOVE Seatools, Dontchya? I like Seatools as it has helped me rehabilitate disks and even SD cards and USB sticks. In my studio I have come to appreciate the capabilities. There are other tools but Seatools 5 is strong and works on all vendors storage product. The WD product is not so good by comparison. What functions of Seatools did you use to rehabilitate the disks? What specific pages of Seatools Documentation did you get this information?

Hardcore Games wrote: Top loaded USB enclosures are convenient as I can move or copy data as desired It makes juggling a box of hard disks much more easily. USB 3.0 has been able to handle hard disk speeds easily. TB3/TB4 is faster for M.2 SSD. Now PCie 6.0 is emerging and USB-C is spinning its wheels. Sliding drawers are convenient, as I can pull them out and store things conveniently, and shut them again. It makes spaces around me quite pleasing to the eye. Some were made of wood, but recently they are just chipboard or MDF. Seatools are not working on these, so I tried Makita, which worked well to recover some of the damaged cabinets

The only way to know if it is possible for a chip-off solution is to split the card PCB out of the plastic shell. Inside there will either be a Monolith or a PCB with chips on it. If you want to split it open carefully, and take pictures of both sides of what's inside, this will possibly give insight into how 'easy' the recovery may be doing chip-off. I would say chip-off for you would be a low probability, given you likely don't have any reader or software for the job. Flash recoveries range from easy, devices from many years ago, to actually impossible and everything in between. The factors for this is not just perseverance, skill or the ability to learn well, as so many people think, so don't take it personally at all! Once we have that info, more advice could be given

Ok. I had the opportunity to test another UHS-I card reader this night. I used the following command to read the first 500Mb: Code: dd if=/dev/sda of=test_500Mb.img bs=1M count=500 500+0 records out 524288000 bytes (524 MB, 500 MiB) copied, 710.1 s, 738 kB/s then, I tried to see the saved content: Code: hexdump -C test_500Mo.img 00000000 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 |UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU| * 1f400000 As for my previous complete image built with ddrescue, it looks the SD card controller is corrupted and is "lying" by returning always the same value (but not the data). It looks the only remaining option is crying now...

Top loaded USB enclosures are convenient as I can move or copy data as desired It makes juggling a box of hard disks much more easily. USB 3.0 has been able to handle hard disk speeds easily. TB3/TB4 is faster for M.2 SSD. Now PCie 6.0 is emerging and USB-C is spinning its wheels.

SeaTools has no value in data recovery, and is potentially data destructive. Me: Does SeaTools have any use in data recovery? Gemini: No, SeaTools is not a data recovery program. It is a hardware diagnostic utility designed to test disk health, identify bad sectors, and generate warranty replacement codes (RMA) for failing drives. Using SeaTools when you have lost files or are trying to rescue data from a dying drive can actually worsen data loss . Where SeaTools Helps vs. Where It Harms Data Recovery Diagnostic Value Only: SeaTools can run basic SMART checks to confirm whether a drive has physical hardware damage. This helps determine if data loss is due to hardware failure versus software issues (like file system corruption or accidental deletion). Avoid Diagnostic Scans on Failing Drives: Running SeaTools "Long Tests" or surface scans on a physically failing hard drive subjects the drive to intense read operations. This strain can cause the drive heads to crash completely, destroying any remaining chance of recovering data. Never Use "Fix All" or "Erase" Functions: SeaTools features like "Fix All" or sector repairs attempt to fix bad sectors by writing zeroes to them, which permanently overwrites and destroys the data stored on those sectors.

HaQue wrote: Hardcore Games wrote: Grab Seatools 5 and run the disk erase feature which should allow the disk at activate spare sectors so that the disk is better performing compared to using substandard sectors Seatools can also check SMART self tests you LOVE Seatools, Dontchya? I like Seatools as it has helped me rehabilitate disks and even SD cards and USB sticks. In my studio I have come to appreciate the capabilities. There are other tools but Seatools 5 is strong and works on all vendors storage product. The WD product is not so good by comparison.

For those of you, like me, who do provide reports for resellers to show their clients, I've created a branding json file for them myself. But, to make it easier, I created a link where you can get the reseller to create their own branding json file exactly how they want it and send it to you use in the future. https://recoveryforce.com/pc3k-to-html/?page=branding

Another area we are working on is support for physical NAS, DAS and SAN storage systems in Hetman RAID Recovery. For these systems, we have implemented support not only for RAID reconstruction itself, but also for the storage layers that may exist above it: physical disks -> RAID -> volume management -> filesystem / LUN -> data Depending on the storage architecture, snapshots may exist at the filesystem, volume or storage-pool level. The software can read RAID metadata directly from member disks or their images and reconstruct the array automatically. If the RAID metadata is damaged or unavailable, the array can also be reconstructed manually by specifying disk order, stripe size, offsets, parity layout and other parameters. NAS For NAS systems, we have implemented support for common Linux-based storage stacks, including Linux MD (mdadm), LVM, Ext2 / Ext3 / Ext4, XFS, Btrfs and ZFS . Vendor-specific RAID layouts are also supported, including: Synology SHR-1 / SHR-2 NETGEAR X-RAID / X-RAID2 The software also handles multi-device storage configurations such as Btrfs and ZFS pools, mirrors and RAIDZ . For Btrfs and ZFS, the software can also work with snapshots. After RAID reconstruction, Hetman RAID Recovery can continue through the higher storage layers, depending on the layout: partition tables, LVM, filesystems, snapshots and LUNs. Example: Synology SHR-2 and LUN recovery In this test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZP2e7991t0 we demonstrated automatic SHR-2 reconstruction