GRC’s Spinrite – anyone still got it, using it?

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I remember getting the early [for me anyhow] version of Spinrite, you had to “marry” it to a specific PC & harddrive. Anyone remember it used to torture the harddrive prior to its scans? Now, I have Spinrite 6 — haven’t used it awhile. Keeping it for diagnostics purposes.

[Ooops, maybe wrong forum section! I guess it can be used to make sure it’s hardware and not software…]

"Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin, revisted

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SpinRite has not been updated in a long time and therefore cannot recommend it for newer systems.
Besides, try running it on a 3TB drive, you’ll be at it for a whole week. That’s just not viable.

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Mod! Thanks for moving this thread 🙂
Clint – you’re very right, I will only use Spinrite 6 on current or older NTFS harddrives.

"Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin, revisted

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Mod! Thanks for moving this thread 🙂
Clint – you’re very right, I will only use Spinrite 6 on current or older NTFS harddrives.

I also find it extremely difficult to use software on newer, not yet available, hard drives!

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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Batcher! You’re a good laugh-producer! What I meant was there are some harddrives existing today that neither Clint or I would dare use Spinrite 6 on. SSD drives for sure. I believe there are some new SATA HDs that would not take kindly to Spinrite 6.

"Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin, revisted

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It’s got nothing to do with the drives themselves, SpinRite will work perfectly well on any, albeit taking forever to run on
todays larger capacity drives. It’s the AHCI drive controller. SpinRite can’t run in AHCI mode.

Steve Gibson has been promising to update it but never does.

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I started using SpinRite5 about 2001, and upgraded to SpinRite6 in 2005. Used SpinRite many times to rescue sick HDDs until about 2010 when new HDD prices had fallen so low that it became hard to justify using SpinRite. Although I have used it several times since but only to enable SMART on systems that had a BIOS that had no SMART options.

As I recall the last HDD I ran SpinRite on to scan for and correct FS errors was a 120GB HDD. The scan took more than 12 hours, and found numerous bad clusters (confirmed by a subsequent chkdsk scan). That HDD was replaced because it didn’t make sense to risk having the corruption spreading, and the customer wanted more disk space anyhow. However, the SpinRite scan did allow me to copy the partition onto a new HDD (after which I ran SpinRite again to restore the clusters that had been marked bad).

I would rather not risk running SpinRite on an SSD or a “hybrid” HDD (HDDs that have flash-memory caching) since there is probably a high risk of shortening the life-expectancy of these drives.

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Yes, brilliant as Steve is, he should have updated SpinRite a long time ago now with the option to recover the data to another drive and most definitely NOT merely move it to good-for-now sectors on what may be a dying drive. I don’t see anyway around the time-allowance for repair on large drives…deep level scans are going to take a truckload of time no matter what.

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FUN, I gotcha! it would be cool to have an option on Spinrite to merely copy [not move] every good sector, every good folder and file [DOS-geeks, remember the olde FAT & DIR tables?!?!] from the suspect drive to an attached usb drive OR to another installed hd. I would not recommend copying from suspect drive’s partition X to suspect drive’s partition Y. I paid $80.00 for Spinrite 6, how much would Spinrite 7 cost, just wondering.

"Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin, revisted

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If he (Steve Gibson) does ever get around to updating SpinRite I doubt he’ll change the price.

What would be nice in an updated version too, would be the ability to dismount a secondary drive and run while in Windows.

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