SpinRite

Horizon_Brave · 2015-12-02 00:45:27

Hey everyone, not sure if anyone is familiar with the harddrive recovery tool "SpinRite". But it's creator, Steve Gibson, sells it as a "hard drive, maintenance and Recovery tool". It's a very small freeDOS application that basically sits ontop of the BIOS and goes into a crazy 'read/write' mode to "exercise" the bits ( I believe he actually does use the term). It has different modes of operation apparently. One mode to keep the drive maintained. It does a read/invert/read process on the sectors and claims to "re-align" any "drift" that the drive may have suffered. He makes the point that over time, from re-heating, cooling, stress, wear and tear, loose hardware like a not 100% precise head, and general usage, cause the tracks on a disk to slowly and subtly shift. His maintainance mode will read the sectors and re-adjust the head to write back the tracks according to how they should be.

His other mode is recovery, which is used if the drive is dying, or appears to be unbootable. It makes the claim that other tools, like the chkdsk from Windows or other recovery tools, make a very half assed attempt to read the sectors. If it see's a sector is damaged is chalks it up to being unrecoverable and moves on. His SpinRite software apparently can take literally days or weeks to fully run, on a badly damaged / corrupted disk, because it just hammers away and asks to read the trouble spot again and again and again until it can recover 'enough' data from the spot to reconstruct the information and write it to another 'safer' area of the drive.

If you watch the video below, he describes it himself.

SpinRite Explained

SpinRite FAQ

Each week on his podcast he presents a letter from a user of this software that claims the drive has worked, and recovered or done something to help him recovered a drive, either SSD, HDD, or even USB etc... Then I do some digging online, and there's people who give it very mixed thoughts. Some people say because of it's age (the last version is from like 2004) it can't work on GPT disks, or disks that use AHCI mode. In your bios you have to go in and manually change the AHCI to recognize legacy IDE mode.

So my question is do you think this would actually work? He provides no source code, no actual deep down method to *how* it's working. He just tells us very generally what it does. Do you think something like this is even safe to use on a regular basis? Something about the "Maintenance Mode" of writing and reading and re-writing seems like it'll just put more stress on the drive if anything else?

Anyone have any experience with this? He charges 90 dollars for a copy so I'm curious as to what you folks think?

Panda · 2015-12-02 01:27:18

@Horizon_Brave,

Kinda interesting but for me, frequent and substantial backups keep me golden and at $90.00? Hell, just bought a 250GB SSD for that.

tknomanzr · 2015-12-02 01:43:42

I would say that 90% of all hdd failures are mechanical in nature. Shock being the worst offender (ie being dropped or hit hard). So I guess a piece of software that would stress what is in all likelihood a mechanical failure or an impending one has a fair chance of creating an unrecoverable crash, meaning if the spindle or armature finally breaks, chances are good the data will be 100% unrecoverable. That's just my opinion on the matter.

Now to what I actually know. Most modern hdd's support S.M.A.R.T status nowadays. And Linux has a suite of tools called smartmontools that allow you to read that status. All hdd's come with a certain number of extra sectors that act as error buffers. What happens is that if a drive has trouble reading or writing to a given sector, it will attempt to recover the information in that sector, then copy it to a sector occupied by these error buffers.

It is easy to assume that if you see data in these buffers, then that is a sign of an impending drive failure but such is not necessarily the case. If you see those sectors being filled up over some reasonable period of time you can safely assume that the drive is getting ready to fail. Also, if you see a drive where those extra sectors are full and the errors are creeping into your actual partitions, then it would be a good idea to replace the drive after salvaging what you can out of it.

I had a drive with windows xp on it that was like this. Windows xp would run but had odd long pauses when doing stuff. One day, I went to install Ubuntu on it and the partition manager simply refused to repartition the drive. A check of its smart status via gparted (see below) showed that it's extra sectors had been filled and the errors were creeping into the actual partitions, causing long pauses while the drive attempted to read through the faulty sectors.

Coincidentally, smartmontools, I believe integrates with gparted so you can check a drive's health from gparted. You can use gparted's error checking facility to check a drive's SMART status and make a decision from there. I see no need to pony up $99 when Linux provides some simply great tools for that sort of thing. Also, a Live USB dedicated to that sort of thing or even a sefl-built one with the right tools installed on it are a good idea to have around, just in case.

Final analysis, I still use mechanical drives for massive storage like > 1TB but have them in an NAS now (any old desktop that can act as a file server would work just as well) and everything is raided up. For OS drives, I am gradually switching over to ssd's.

Anecdote: At one time back in 2000 or so, I had a Windows executable written in 100% assembly that could check an entire drive for rootkits in less that 5 minutes. The consequence was that my hdd would sound like an airplane taking off. Assembly is just that fast In that same era, I caught a virus on Windows 2000 by clicking a simple jpeg that managed to infect over 1500 system files before I could get a forced power off done. If he wrote the software correctly, it is entirely possible that it could be as fast as he claims.

Last edited by tknomanzr (2015-12-02 01:46:05)

Head_on_a_Stick · 2015-12-02 08:07:10

Panda wrote:

$90.00? Hell, just bought a 250GB SSD for that

+1

Bearded_Blunder · 2016-10-18 00:03:57

As a user for some years of SpinRite, I can attest, that at least for small conventional hard drives, it works well, pretty much as advertised, however, there are issues with modern drives where it can't access the SMART data (minor thing), and where it bombs out with a divide overflow as soon as ( I think it's the cylinder count ) hits 65535 during testing, which then of course wraps round to 0, meaning most big modern drives can't be tested, or only the first section can.

Addressing track drift, modern drives embed servo information to deal with this, at the data density used in modern drives dynamic correction is needed for simple temperature variations, so such correction isn't really needed.

Being fair, it makes a much more comprehensive attempt at recovering data from damaged sectors than any other tool I know, and certainly the vast majority of Windows tools just make several attempts at reading a sector, and if they fail simply ditch whatever that sector contained, which can be a big deal or harmless depending (at opposite ends of the scale) if said sector contained the directory structure for the disk, or resided in free space, dd_rescue does better than most windows tools, but is somewhat arcane to use where dodgy sectors exist.

Refeshing the data (reading and writing back) can be useful to counteract bit-rot which does happen over enough time. It's also one of very few tools I know which can safely force a drive's firmware to remap a bad sector even after Windows CHKDSK mapped it out of the filesystem (chkdsk /b to retest and mark the remapped sector good again afterwards).

Are these features worth $90? Not unless and until that divide overflow (trivial fix) and SMART support for SATA drives are added, if the mythical vapour-ware version 6.1 ever appears correcting those deficiencies, for which I've been waiting years, then it might be worth considering.

Meanwhile, without the associated expense, to refresh a drive's data, and force that sector remapping I suggest Linux, just about any live cd

sudo badblocks -svn /dev/sdX

will get the job done.

As for recovering the data from a "gone bad" sector, this is what backups and disk images are for.

SpinRite was unparalleled at what it does, until disks got too big for it, and Steve didn't bother to update. It's usefulness is also pretty limited on SSD's where the data recovery tricks of trying to land on a given track from various directions and distances to get a good read are completely wasted, and "check readability" is about the only safe function.

If you need to do that, to "alert the SDD firmware" of difficult to read sectors try

sudo dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/null bs=4096

on an unmounted drive.

Having said all that, it's saved the day for me often enough back in the day, if SG were to release a version that actually worked on modern spinning drives, not just the first 65535 tracks, I'd probably buy it. I'm not holding my breath though.

Horizon_Brave · 2016-10-18 14:41:31

Wow Bearded_Blunder, great post, enjoyed reading your experience with it. Thanks! Yea it's a shame that Steve Gibson has sort of turn S.R into a back burner project. He's going on and on about his "new" project Sqrl, which to me, isn't really going to go anywhere.
I'm glad you gave a fair comparison to other utilities like chkdsk and smarttools.

It's funny from the time I first posted this back in Dec, I've already bought SpinRite, (back in June). And I used it with fingers crossed, and immediately I got the red overflow division error. It seems like other software could just issue a patch or something for this in like a month, and just have previous buyers be able to download it. I don't get by Steve G. is so... methodically slow with everything.
Like I said, I ran in to the 65k sector problem myself with this, and it's sort of frustrating, so I'm not too pleased at the moment with the 90 bucks sort of 'lost'.

Bearded_Blunder · 2016-10-18 14:55:32

You could always see how good he is at honouring his much talked about satisfaction or money back guarantee. It's not as if patching that would take a month, change unsigned INT to unsigned LONG (or whatever the equivalent is) when you define the var, recompile, job done, three guesses why I'm unimpressed at having been waiting over 10 years for a fix....

It's still useful sometimes for the sorts of small hard drives sometimes found in older laptops.

edit wrote:

Regarding "Immediately got divide overflow" rather than after some time running, that's a different issue, the easiest workaround being to run it under real MS-DOS rather than Free-DOS, it can be fixed under Free-DOS, but I don't remember the fix right now

Last edited by Bearded_Blunder (2016-10-18 15:18:27)

KrunchTime · 2016-12-29 00:57:21

I used Spinrite once years ago to resolve an issue with one of my hard drives.

5 years ago, I was resizing an existing partition on the hard drive in my laptop to make room for #! Linux and forgot to monitor the battery level. Laptop shut off in the middle of resizing the partition and hosed everything. After several fruitless attempts using SystemRescueCD to revert to a period prior to the partition resizing, I purchased the following product which worked and was much easier to use:

http://www.boot-disk.com/

#1 2015-12-02 00:45:27

SpinRite

#2 2015-12-02 01:27:18

Re: SpinRite

#3 2015-12-02 01:43:42

Re: SpinRite

#4 2015-12-02 08:07:10

Re: SpinRite

#5 2016-10-18 00:03:57

Re: SpinRite

#6 2016-10-18 14:41:31

Re: SpinRite

#7 2016-10-18 14:55:32

Re: SpinRite

#8 2016-12-29 00:57:21

Re: SpinRite

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