Or go the slightly easier route and just download dd_rescue: If you've got an hour or so to spare, I'd say it's worth your time to learn how to use dd instead of buying SpinRite: You can tell it to copy all the good data off the drive, then you can run it a few more times to go and try harder (i.e., use smaller block sizes) trying to pull data off the bad areas. We've had to recover other data recently, and dd has done a great job. Personally, I'd rather get the data off the disk as quickly as possible, make several backup images, and try to repair the files offline. It wouldn't surprise me if the disk degraded even further while SpinRite was running.
There's something to be said for not running a dying disk for an entire month, as it's dying! Physical defects seem to have a habit of spreading. However, despite the fact that it worked, I don't know if it helped any more than just booting off a Linux CD and running dd to copy the entire drive to a file. SpinRite also made the drive mountable again. (In SpinRite's defense, it can scan a drive in just a few hours if there are no physical defects.) SpinRite was eventually able to recover all our files, although many of the larger ones turned out to be corrupt anyway. Again, it ran nonstop for more than a month trying to recover data from a defective 200 GB drive. Every time it hit a bad cluster, it spent hours trying to recover data from it. In the end, we purchased and ran SpinRite.which continued to run for more than 1 month. When the drive died, we couldn't get it to mount, no matter how many times we ran chkdsk or other tools. This was supposed to be the "shared" drive on which people just dumped stuff temporarily, but it ended up turning into a huge data repository that had miscellaneous backups, as well as a bunch of files that nobody bothered to back up anywhere. We had a 200 GB NTFS drive that suddenly failed catastrophically. There are free solutions which work just as well (actually, the free ones might work even better). In fact, it might just be too clever for its own good. I've had a reasonably good experience with SpinRite, but I think it's highly overrated.
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