April/May NewsLetter - Tiger's Evaluation of SpinRite

Tiger's Evaluation of SpinRite

SpinRite 5.0 The SpinRite download was very quick and easy, it's only about 95k.

I read over most of the support info. Steve's web site is very informative and written in plain English. (handy for a geek in training like me)

I was a little disappointed to discover that SpinRite does not support my Win2k NTFS format - only FAT. It does allow for drive inspection prior to NTFS formatting, something I may get to try soon as I am getting ready to reinstall everything (something I do every six months of so.)

I have used Shields Up! and OptOut two more of Steve's products. I was very pleased with them.

I ran SpinRite on the old P60, 426 meg hard drive first. Followed the clear directions for creating a floppy boot disk (very easy to make). You format a floppy from a DOS window (format /s /u). Then copy spinrite.exe to the floppy. Boot from the floppy, run SR. Being lazy, I wrote a little batch file to automatically start SR.

At a:\ prompt type:

copy con autoexec.bat
spinrite
<CTRL> Z

That's it. If your system is set to boot from a:\ drive first (default on most PC's) you just put you SR disk in a:\ and start the computer. It loads DOS (without any extra drivers) and starts SpinRite.

It ran for just under two hours, reported no problems. It saved a log to the root directory with plenty of detailed info, including the optional benchmark data. The log file (report) includes a graphic that looks a little like the expanded view you see when running defrag. The ascii codes in each cell indicate results; perfect and empty, perfect w/data, recovered data, defective sector, and a few more.

There are half a dozen entertaining and informative screens to watch as it runs (if you don't turn the monitor off)

The Win98 T-bird 850, 12.8 gig hard drive took 21 hours 42 minutes to complete. However SpinRite offers a suspend option so it can be run in pieces during off hours.

The next project was to try to salvage a failed drive. I was anxious to see if SR could make it useful again. It was in my old AMD K6-2 166. It kept crashing. I had tried f-disk, format, (once the hard way and once using the manufacturer's disk utilities) and re-installed Win98. Even the clean install would take a few tries to complete. Each time, within days it was crashing again. It couldn't find this.dll or that.idf file. It could not survive a 24 hour burn-in. Scandisk generated more and more pieces of lost data. Other than a txt file, I have never been able to get any benefit from them. The mfg diagnostics could not find a problem and it was out of warranty. SpinRite recovered some of the lost data and gave the drive a real workout. It was very slow on this drive. It estimated 12 hours, but ran for 30 before it finally finished.

I reformatted after running SpinRite. Re-installed Windows. It has been working without a hitch for over a month. If I continue to run SpinRite on a regular basis I believe the old drive will last just about forever. Because it works the drive so hard, SR is able to find and block off bad sectors before they fail (and cause data loss).

Overall SpinRite is easy to use. It actually moves the data from each sector, then stresses that sector, then moves the data back, there is nothing else (that I know of) that does the same thing. It finds problems long before scandisk could and saves the data (instead of throwing it away like scandisk does). I give it a nine (out of ten), because it doesn't yet work with NTFS. If it saves one drive it has more than paid for itself. If it prevents loss of your data - well you fill in the blank. . .

-tiger (Orlando)

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