Re: Spinrite Full Version Free 16
Arnau Cyr
See what customers who use SpinRite think about it,
and for answers to the most common questions . . .
An Independent Review of SpinRite 6.0
KickstartNews recently reviewed our new SpinRite v6.0. Here's a piece of their experience . . .
The opportunity for the first test appeared only one day after we received our copy of version 6. An 80GB hard drive on one of our busy storage servers decided to pack it in. Prior to trying SpinRite we were still able to access the drive intermittently but it was impossible to copy data or run a file undelete utility. A handful of important files had been written to the drive subsequent to the last backup the previous night; files which we needed within about 48 hours, which meant that a professional data recovery service (with its three week backlog) was out of the question. We removed the drive and installed it in an identical hardware configuration, then booted SpinRite 6 from CD and did a Level 2 recovery (see above for recovery level definitions). After 22 hours, SpinRite completed its work and pronounced the drive fully recovered. We reinstalled the drive in the original server. It ran perfectly, the research assistant who had created the required files copied them off the drive and that was that. Nice job SpinRite 6. The drive was still running fine as we went to publication with this review two weeks after the incident. We used a level 2 setting in SpinRite: Recover Unreadable Data.
You may read the entire SpinRite 6.0 review at Kickstartnews.A review with Great Screen Shots
Leon Goldstein wrote a SpinRite v6.0 review for the Linux Journal. Leon's review includes shows some great screen shots of SpinRite in operation.
You may read the entire SpinRite 6.0 review at The Linux Journal.If you are not already familiar with SpinRite's more than 35 year history of
seemingly miraculous data recovery, or if you are not sure SpinRite is for you, please
take a few minutes to read some true-life stories from SpinRite's users.
SpinRite v6.1's mission was to run internal PATA/IDE and SATA/AHCI drives at their maximum possible speed while further improving SpinRite's legendary data recovery technologies. SpinRite v6.1 does all that and more.
To obtain direct, low-level access to a system's mass storage drives, SpinRite runs under a GRC-customized version of FreeDOS which has been modified to add compatibility with all file systems. In order to run SpinRite it must first be possible to boot FreeDOS.
The participants here, who have taken the time to share their knowledge and experience, their successes and some frustrations with booting their computers into FreeDOS, have created a valuable knowledgebase which will benefit everyone who follows.
SpinRite is a computer program for scanning RAS Random Access Storage devices such as hard disks, reading and rewriting data to resolve and retrieve data that is unreadable by DOS or Windows. The first version was released in 1987 by Steve Gibson. The current version, 6.1, was released in 2024.[2]
SpinRite is run from a bootable medium (such as a CD, DVD or USB flash drive) on a PC-compatible computer, allowing it to scan a computer's storage medium. It does not depend on the operating system installed on the computer.
SpinRite was originally written as a hard drive interleave tool.[3] At the time SpinRite was designed, hard drives often had a defect list printed on the nameplate, listing known bad sectors discovered at the factory. In changing the drive's interleave, SpinRite needed to be able to remap these physical defects into different logical sectors. SpinRite therefore gained its data recovery and testing capabilities as a side-effect of its original purpose. Drive interleave has long ceased to be an issue, but SpinRite continued to be developed, now using its remapping as a data recovery tool.
SpinRite tests the data surfaces of writeable magnetic disks, including IDE, SATA, and floppy disks, plus SSD Solid State Drives. It analyzes their contents and can refresh the magnetic disk surfaces or flash memory storage to allow them to operate more reliably.[citation needed]
SpinRite attempts to recover data from drives that the operating system cannot read. When the program encounters errors reading data, it tries to read the sector up to 2000 times, in order to determine, by comparing the successive results, the most probable value of each bit.[4] The data is then saved to the original location or to a location on the same disk; it does not save data elsewhere. In this respect, SpinRite differs from most data recovery software, which usually provides (and recommends) an option to save the recovered data onto another disk, or onto a separate partition on the same disk.
Gibson says he designed SpinRite to fix sector problems, not failures of circuit boards, motors, or other mechanical parts.[5] When a hard drive's ability to read data slows and or begins unreliable, SpinRite may recover data that then can be copied to another drive.
SpinRite is claimed by its developer to have certain unique features,[4] such as disabling of disk write caching, disabling of auto-relocation, compatibility with disk compression, identification of the "data-to-flux-reversal encoder-decoder" used in a drive, and separate testing of buffered and unbuffered disk read performance, and direct hardware-level access,[6] whereby the drive's internal controller interacts directly with the program, rather than through the operating system. This, in turn, allows dynamic head repositioning, whereby, when reading a faulty sector, the reading head is deliberately moved backwards and forwards many times, by varying amounts, in the hope that each time it returns to the sector, it may come to rest in a slightly different position. By performing statistical analysis on the succession of results thus obtained, SpinRite is, according to its maker, often able to "reconstruct" data from damaged sectors, and even in those cases in which complete reconstruction proves impossible, SpinRite is able to extract all intact bits from a partially unreadable, and write them back, or copy them to a new block, thereby minimizing the amount of data lost.[7]
SpinRite is written in x86 assembly language, and runs on any PC-compatible computer, regardless of the operating system installed. It can operate on any attached storage device with a compatible interface.[8]Drives in computers with incompatible processors can be tested by attaching the drive to a compatible computer.[9] Spinrite is distributed as a Microsoft Windows executable program which can create a bootable drive containing both the FreeDOS MS-DOS-compatible operating system and the Spinrite program itself.Version 6 is compatible with hard disks containing any logical volume management or file system such as FAT16 or 32, NTFS, Ext3 as well as other Linux file systems, HFS+ For Mac OS X, TiVo and others.
Spinrite can be run and can be effective on SSDs, but running in a higher-level mode than 1 or 2 is detrimental, as it wears the SSD by writing to it unnecessarily. In episode #387 of the podcast Security Now! Gibson said "Run Level 2 because Level 1 is not permitted to fix anything" "The difference is both Level 1 and 2 are read-only, and that's the key. You don't want to run Level 4" [11] In episode 194 of the podcast Security Now! Gibson said that he could "see absolutely no possible benefit to running SpinRite on a solid-state drive" and later "SpinRite is all about mechanics and magnetics, neither of which exist, by design, in an SSD".[12] In episode 338 Gibson clarified "it is actually detrimental because [solid-state drives] don't like to be written", but also pointing out that a read-only run could be beneficial: "SpinRite's Level 1 is a read-only scan, and doing that on an SSD makes a lot of sense. Do a read-only scan of an SSD, it'll show the SSD's controller that it's got a problem reading a sector, and then it'll map that out or rewrite it in order to strengthen that sector, if possible. So that ends up being a value for SpinRite on solid-state drives."[13] Also, Gibson responded to a question on his website that "SpinRite works on thumb drives and on all other solid state drives".[14]
While SATA drives are supported, SATA controllers that include a processor and diagnostic software can limit SpinRite's ability to obtain and display S.M.A.R.T. data ("thin controller" SATA controllers do not have this limitation). This data monitor does not affect SpinRite's recovery and diagnostics ability; S.M.A.R.T. data when available helps long-term disk maintenance and failure prediction.[15] GRC said in 2006 that this issue would be resolved in version 6.1, anticipated to be a free-of-charge upgrade for SpinRite 6.0 users.[15] As of June 2022[update], SpinRite version 6.0 continued to be current, unable to function with systems that utilize EFI bios, with unchanged price.[16][17]
In certain cases, Spinrite can only analyze somewhere between the first 128 gigabytes and 1024 gigabytes of a drive depending on whether the drive has 512 bytes per sector or 4096 bytes per sector, and depending on the BIOS in use.
This limits SpinRite to access a maximum of 268,435,456 sectors. Once SpinRite reaches track number 65,535 it will experience a division-by-zero error and halt with an error message. This appears to be due to a restriction of the FreeDOS operating system (an MS-DOS clone) supplied with Spinrite. Some users have reported that Spinrite has problems with very large drives, and that using, say, MS-DOS boot disk created from Windows 95 or 98 (which refers to itself as MS-DOS version 7, which is otherwise not sold separately), Spinrite will test the entire drive without software error; other users report that this did not resolve the Division Overflow error.[18]
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