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Spinrite 6.0 Full Gratis. SpinRite v6.0 achieves complete operating system independence by incorporating the FreeDOS operating system. This allows it to be used on any and all Intel/AMD PC systems. As you can see from the Windows screen image above, SpinRite 6.0 can create a bootable diskette or generate a standard, CD-R burnable ISO file to. Spinrite 6 0 free download, and many more programs.

SpinRite is a computer program for scanning magnetic data storage devices such as hard disks, recovering data from them and refreshing their surfaces. The first version was released in 1987 by Steve Gibson. Version 6.0, still current as of June 2021, was released in 2004.^[1] SpinRite is run from a bootable medium (such as a CD, DVD or USB memory stick) on a PC-compatible computer, allowing it to scan a computer's hard drive and file system.

History[edit]

SpinRite was originally written as a hard drive interleave tool.^[2] 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.

Features[edit]

SpinRite tests the data surfaces of writeable magnetic disks, including IDE, SATA, and floppy disks. It analyzes their contents and can refresh the magnetic disk surfaces to allow them to operate more reliably.^{[citation needed]}

SpinRite attempts to recover data from hard disks with damaged portions that may not be readable via the operating system. When the program encounters a sector with errors that cannot be corrected by the disk drive's error-correcting code, 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.^[3] The data is then saved onto a new block on the same disk; it cannot be saved 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 his software was specifically designed to fix sector problems. However, if a hard drive's circuit board, drive motors or other mechanical parts are defective, or there is systemic file system corruption, SpinRite may be of little or no help.^[4] When a hard drive begins to fail due to mechanical faults, a program like SpinRite may extend its life long enough to carry out successful file recovery with other specialized software.

SpinRite is claimed by its developer to have certain unique features,^[3] 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. Another important feature is direct hardware-level access,^[5] 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 damaged sector, and to copy them to a new block, thereby minimizing the amount of data lost.^[6]

Some claims by SpinRite's author have proved controversial. The ability to 'refresh' aging drives has been met with particular skepticism while the 'recovery' of sectors marked as 'damaged' is considered by some to be undesirable and counter-productive.^[7]

SpinRite is written in x86assembly 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.

Version 6 offers full access to the entire disk surface regardless of partitioning, Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) parameters and control of partial scanning within a specified percentage range. Version 5 was limited to AT Attachment (PATA, IDE) hard drives; version 6 may, on suitable motherboards, work on newer Serial ATA (SATA) and USB hard drives, and with any other type of drive—SCSI, 1394/FireWire—that can be made visible to MS-DOS through the addition of controller BIOS or add-on DOS drivers.^[9]

The price as of October 2018 was US$89, unchanged over many years. Documentation may be downloaded from the SpinRite website.

In May 2013 Steve Gibson announced the start of work on Spinrite 6.1 and 7.^[10]

Issues[edit]

Solid state drives[edit]

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 posted on his website that 'SpinRite is seeing many successes [...] with non-spinning solid-state (thumb) drives!'.^[14]

S.M.A.R.T. on SATA drives[edit]

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 March 2021, SpinRite version 6.0 continued to be current, unable to function with systems that utilize EFI bios, with unchanged price.^[16][17]

Large drives[edit]

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.

SpinRite uses cylinder-head-sector method when addressing the hard drive. This 28-bit addressing scheme is broken down as:

1. Cylinder (16-bits): 0–65535
2. Head (4-bits): 0–15
3. Sector (8-bits): 0–255

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]

A December 2011 page on the Spinrite Web site says that an anomaly, which was named the 'Roger anomaly' after its discoverer, is due to an error in the BIOS of some motherboards which does not affect normal use and hence may not be discovered.^[19] A motherboard with this problem will not work with Spinrite, although it is sometimes resolved in a later BIOS update. In case of a motherboard compatibility issue, Spinrite say that drives can always be temporarily connected to another motherboard where 'SpinRite will almost certainly agree to operate without trouble'.^[19] Drive size is not mentioned as a factor.

Reception[edit]

BYTE in 1989 listed SpinRite as among the 'Distinction' winners of the BYTE Awards, stating that while alternatives had appeared, 'for now, SpinRite is our pick'.^[20]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^'SpinRite web page'. Retrieved August 8, 2019.
2. ^'Interesting Intel History'. Security Now!. Episode 410. TWiT.tv. June 26, 2013. Transcript. Retrieved November 21, 2013.
3. ^ ^ab'SpinRite Exclusive Features'. grc.com. Retrieved August 8, 2019.
4. ^'BailiWicked Domain Attack'. Security Now!. Episode 155. July 31, 2008. Transcript. Retrieved November 21, 2013.
5. ^Mainelli, Tom (August 2, 2004). 'SpinRite 6 to the Rescue'. PCWorld. Retrieved November 21, 2013.
6. ^Zeltzer, Jay S. (August 10, 2005). 'Anticipate Drive Problems Early with SpinRite v6.0'. sysopt.com. Archived from the original on November 25, 2005. Retrieved November 21, 2013.
7. ^Navas, John (February 26, 2000). 'Re: NEW PPPOE protocol for WIN 2000, works great''. Newsgroup: comp.dcom.xdsl.(Criticism in 2000 of SpinRite's stated operating principles)
8. ^Watkins, Don (May 2005). 'PCNet File Catch - SpinRite 6.0'. PCNet Online. Retrieved November 21, 2013.
9. ^ ^abGoldstein, Leon A. (July 19, 2004). 'SpinRite 6.0 for Linux Users'. Linux Journal. Retrieved November 21, 2013.
10. ^'It's time for some more work on SpinRite'. Gibson Research Corporation Internet Newsgroup Discussion Forums. Retrieved August 23, 2016.
11. ^CORPORATION, Steve Gibson, GIBSON RESEARCH. 'Security Now! Transcript of Episode #387'. www.grc.com. Retrieved September 11, 2018.
12. ^'Listener Feedback #65'. Security Now!. Episode 194. grc.com. April 30, 2009. Transcript. Retrieved November 21, 2013.
13. ^'Listener Feedback #136'. Security Now!. Episode 338. grc.com. February 2, 2012. Transcript. Retrieved November 30, 2012.
14. ^'SpinRite Testimonials'. GRC.com. Retrieved November 29, 2012.
15. ^ ^ab'SATA Operation with SpinRite'. grc.com. 2006. Retrieved January 29, 2010.
16. ^On March 5, 2021, v6.0 was the only version offered for sale on the GRC Web site
17. ^'Listener Feedback #137'. Security Now!. Episode 340. February 16, 2012. Transcript. Retrieved February 27, 2012. STEVE: And SpinRite 6.1 timing, I have no idea. It is, however, the next major thing I'm going to do. It will be a free upgrade for everyone who has 6.0, oh these many years. And the target is to catch it up with things that have happened since.... And then we'll see where we are. I would love to move on to 7.0 and add a bunch of new features, as well.
18. ^'How to fix Spinrite's Division Overflow Error when scanning larger drives'. Neowin Forums: A Collection of Essential Guides. Retrieved December 11, 2012.
19. ^ ^ab'Bad BIOS Motherboards'. grc.com. December 20, 2011. Retrieved November 21, 2013.
20. ^'The BYTE Awards'. BYTE. January 1989. p. 327.

SpinRite is a stand-alone DOS program designed to refurbish hard drives, floppy disks and recover data from marginally or completely unreadable hard drives and floppy disks and from partitions and folders which have become unreadable. Did we just say DOS? Yes. There are certain things you really can’t do properly in Windows. The explanation is that while the operating system is running it’s very difficult to get access to hardware and systems which function ahead of theoperating system. So using SpinRite requires a reboot and once you do that, a whole world of data recovery and long-term hard drive maintenance opens up to you.

SpinRite 6 interacts directly with magnetic storage media at a level below any installedoperating system . This version is able to operate on all Windows XP NTFS formats in addition to all DOS FAT, all Linux file systems, Novell, Macintosh (if temporarily moved into a PC) or anything else.SpinRite can also be used to repair and recover the hard drive from a TiVo personal video recorder. SpinRite originally introduced the concept of non-destructive low-level reformatting and sector interleave optimization all of which basically means that the software can read, analyze, correct then rewrite every tiny bit of data on ahard drive , re-establishing the formatting, without losing any original data, without screwing up your files (they’ll work better actually) or messing up your partitions (they’ll work better too), or fouling up the factory low-level formatting of any hard drive. SpinRite has been under continuous development for 16 years (since v1 in 1988) and is probably the most popular disk data recovery tool on the market today.

What SpinRite is not is a file undelete or defragmentation utility. If you’ve ever encountered inaccessible drives or partitions, folders that won’t open and drives or folders containing corrupt files, you need a tool likeSpinRite. We set out to prove SpinRite 6’s effectiveness by tossing it into the data recovery ring with the rest of our drive and data maintenance tools. Note that we usedSpinRite in our research offices from v3 through v5, until we upgraded all of the network to Windows 2000 NTFS formatting a few years ago. The release ofSpinRite v6 is welcome indeed because it fully addresses NTFS formatted drives (which was about the only thingSpinRite 5 couldn’t touch).

When you boot into SpinRite it does a general drive analysis and checks whether or not Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) has been turned on in the system BIOS. This technology is able to predict up to 75% of all hard disk problems, but to constructively use the information S.M.A.R.T. produces you need software (such asSpinRite 6) which can retrieve the data from the disk for analysis. But SpinRite ‘s real power resides in its own complex statistical analysis technology, called DynaStat, to work some real data recovery magic on drives which would otherwise be complete junk.SpinRite ‘s proprietary design is as simple to use as anything we’ve ever seen—no typing, no command lines, no complex or technically opaque configurations—with just a few key presses required to start the program and select the actions you want it to perform.

For the uninitiated, a few drive technology definitions are in order. First and foremost it’s important to know that everyhard drive contains thin, round, hard platters, spun at high rotational velocities. Floppy disk platters are, well, thin and floppy and made of acetate plastic. Both kinds of platter surfaces are coated with microscopically tiny magnetic particles. Remind you of something? All those who said “magnetic recording tape” take a bow. In fact, storage technology has advanced not because of changes in fundamental theory (those changes are coming over the next few years mind you) but because of advancements in the type, physical amount, density and consistency of magnetically coercible platter coatings, because of the advancements in design of the drive heads which are used to read and write data to the exotic coatings, and because of the incremental improvements in drive motor and bearing technology which have enabled faster rotational speeds and controlled operating temperatures. If nothing else external happens (unusual cold, excessive heat, physical damage) and if the drive is turned off with the computer every night, under normal use a typicalhard drive can theoretically last for a decade. The problem is that the drive surface coatings develop inconsistencies, data is incorrectly written from time to time, physical bumps & bangs take place and excess heat takes its toll on drive electronics. The fallacy surroundinghard drive problems is that once the drive starts throwing errors all over the place, it’s time to replace it. That’s not true most of the time. As a matter of fact, more often than not if the drive is not making unusual noises and if you haven’t actually burned out any of the drive electronics, the balky old thing may just needs some tender loving care. That’s whereSpinRite 6 comes in.

We prepared for the first data recovery task by installing SpinRite in its own unique way. Normally, you install new software on a hard drive, but SpinRite operates in a completely different manner. The SpinRite 6 installer gives you the choice of creating a bootable DOS floppy diskette or a bootable CD-ROM. We made one of each. The diskette is simple—the installer does all the work for you. Creating a CD-ROM requires that you have a CD burner in the computer along with some sort of CD burning software. No files are installed anywhere on yourhard drive—there aren’t even any Windows Registry entries. The whole installation is perfectly self-contained. SpinRite is a tiny program, written in Assembler.

There are a total of 5 data analysis and recovery settings in SpinRite: 1) Examine the Surfaces – provides a complete report on the drive’s health; 2) Recover Unreadable Data – uses Gibson Research’s proprietary tolerance & recovery routines to fully rewrite the entire disk, analyzing and correcting surface errors and recovering data along the way; 3) Refresh the Surfaces – completely reads and rewrites all disk data bit by bit, twice; 4) Locate Surface Errors – reads all data twice, flipping bits from 1 to 0 and back again while fully recovering areas already marked as bad; and 5) Restore Good Sectors – reads and rewrites the entire disk bit by bit and fully restores previously unusable areas of the drive.

The opportunity for the first test appeared only one day after we received our copy of version 6. An 80GBhard 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 bootedSpinRite 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 jobSpinRite 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 inSpinRite: Recover Unreadable Data.

Don’t confuse SpinRite with Microsoft’s ScanDisk. ScanDisk’s so-called surface scan only verifies that a drive’s sectors can be read but does nothing to verify that they can be written or that data which is written can be read back. If ScanDisk can’t read a sector it simply marks it as bad and moves on. Rather than giving up when a sector can’t be read, or rather than accepting only the data a drive might be able to initially yield, SpinRite’s DynaStat system accumulates a comprehensive statistical database about the behavior of any individual sector’s data through the accumulation and classification of up to 2,000 individual sector re-reads. By understanding the unlock/re-lock behavior of the drive’s data-to-flux reversal encoder/decoder, and by processing the sector’s data ‘tails’ after encountering a defect of any kind, SpinRite ‘reverse engineers’ the sector’s original data from the statistical performance profile of the unreadable sector’s flux reversals. The result is most often complete recovery of data that would otherwise have been utterly lost. Our experience is that running SpinRite every two or three months on all our machines has always kept them running smoothly and prevented all sorts of data loss problems. SpinRite is technically complex, all the more reason to be thankful that its configuration choices are severely constrained for end users.

Cons: Picky, picky picky about floppy disks – we went through 5 disks before finding one that SpinRite 6 would format and set up as a boot diskette. Clean, freshly formatted, name brand diskettes only please. The software requires time—lots and lots of time—which is not strictly a Con but rather more of a warning because this kind of superb data recovery simply cannot take place quickly due to the inherent limits of the hardware, magnetic media and the complex nature of the algorithms used to do the actual recovery. The UI could use a little tweak because the initial recovery level selection screen may fool you into thinking the software only offers level 2 & 4. You have to go into the settings menu to change recovery levels.

Pros: We tried it on an ancient 386SX box containing an old, cranky 60MB(!?) Quantum IDE drive which, after running SpinRite, now has no bad sectors and was finally made accessible enough to copy off some valuable documents which we thought were lost forever. SpinRite ran as well on the old machine as it did on the latest Core 2 Duo and dual processor Xeon screamers. Automatically turns on S.M.A.R.T. in your BIOS (make sure you boot int0 the BIOS afterward in order to permanently turn on S.M.A.R.T). Safe and secure as we found after checking the 9th or 10th drive without a single glitch, lockup, crash or indeed anything else other than rock solid stability, which means that SpinRite is fully focused on solving problems rather than adding difficulties of its own. If you use hard drives (I think that means all of us), if you’re in IS/IT, or if you’ve ever wished for a comprehensive drive recovery and maintenance tool which doesn’t require a degree in mathematics to use, try SpinRite 6. The drives you save may be your own. Highly recommended.

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