Any way to get SR6.1r4 to work on USB drives?

[Dibrom]

Quick question (or two), about SR6.1r4. I have it working just fine for direct SATA adapter connected drives no problem. I do however also have a couple of drives which only have various versions of USB connector on them. One is a Mini-b USB and there are a few others that are Micro-B USB. Obviously with that connector only, I cannot connect them directly to the SATA ports on the MoBo for access under FreeDOS.

Is there any workaround or dodgy way of getting SR access to these sort of drives? Failing that, then is there an equivalent way of doing something similar under Hard Disk Sentinel v6.20 instead? I have both programs.

 

[ColbyBouma]

If the drive is powered on and plugged into your computer before you boot into SpinRite, it's possible for SpinRite to see it. However, this is dependent on your BIOS. Not all of them are cooperative.

 

[Dibrom]

Thank you for your reply. My USB ports are still powered and active with the main PSU powered even if the computer is not actually running, but I suspect that is not enough. I have tried booting into FreeDOS with the SR6.1 USB, but the drive scan doesn't find the USB connected drive, even though its bright blue light is on saying it's connected. Any idea what sort of setting to look for in BIOS? The computer is a Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3

 

[PHolder]

It's complicated by the fact that nearly every BIOS/Motherboard combo is different/unique. On some systems, only certain USB ports or port types (such as USB 2 vs USB 3) are seen by the BIOS. I guess one suggestion is to boot into your BIOS with a drive connected in one port or the other and see if you can see it just inside the BIOS. (Probably under the boot selection screen or boot order screen, for example.) No guarantees even if it shows there that FreeDOS will also see it, but that's probably your best strategy.

It's also possible the the system may behave differently depending on if you reset it versus power it on from cold. So you may need to investigate that too.

 

[Dibrom]

Thank you for the suggestions, yes that all makes sense. I am going to test all that and see if I can get it working. In particular I have only tested the drives connected to USB-3 ports and it makes a lot of sense that it's far likelier only the USB-2 ports will be active if any are at the early BIOS stages of boot up.

Edit: You were bang on 100% correct. I tried a USB-2 socket instead and BIOS could then read the drive at boot up. This however brought up another problem that sounds like there's no way around until SR v7.

 

[Scott]

If you can’t get it to work natively, you could run SR under VirtualBox. You can map any drive type recognized by the host OS (including USB drives) to the virtual machine and SpinRite will see it. If you don’t need to scan your internal drives, just skip over the part about creating a boot drive and run VirtualBox under Windows, and then ONLY map the USB drives to the VM session.

https://forums.grc.com/threads/how-to-run-spinrite-on-a-uefi-only-machine-part-1-of-5.1613/