I almost hate to write about this program, as it has made me an incredible amount of money over the years.
Spinrite is the name of an older program (1988) and it’s job is to scan magnetic data storage surfaces. Using a quite complex comparative system, it can find terminal (no worky) and minor issues on a hard drive and repair them.
This thing examines each bit (1 or 0) multiple times if there is any question about data integrity. This is one of the reasons it is unique, it can repair hard drives leaving them in better condition than before. I use it on almost all the systems I support and also to recover dead drives (and it’s data).
Issue:
The real reason for this post is to document how to use this program with the new SATA drives. My new ASUS UL30vt has a 500gig SATA drive in it and I wanted to groom the drive to make sure it will not die on me. Using a USB CD, I boot off of the Spinrite boot CD but the program never really round the drive.
Solution:
Newer motherboard BIOS have a SATA setting that needs to be set to “Compatibility Mode” or “Legacy IDE” for Spinrite to see the drive. After you save the BIOS setting, Spinrite will work correctly from that point on……just be sure to set the BIOS back so that you can boot your Windows install afterward.
This is twice that I have had to research this solution and so wanted to document it for future brain failures.
10% of what I know about security and computer systems, I learned from it’s creator Steve Gibson and you can see some of his projects at www.GRC.com .
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