Boot SpinRite 6.1 on Apple Silicon?

[nycvelo]

To run SpinRite 6.1, does the "BootAble.img" file available from GRC allow booting from a USB flash drive on Apple silicon?

Asking because a Mac Studio 2023 with an Apple M2 Max CPU is unable to see a USB boot drive created using GRC's BootAble.img file.

Tried the following:

- create USB boot drive with Etcher
- create USB boot drive with "sudo dd if=BootAble.img of=disk<x> bs=1m status=progress" where <x> is the USB flash drive's device number
- create USB boot drive with dd on different USB flash media

- power up the system by holding the power button for about 15-20 seconds. The only boot drive the system sees is the MacOS disk.
- power up the system by holding the Alt key after hearing the chime. This just boots straight to the MacOS disk.

In all cases the USB flash media are first formatted in MS-DOS (FAT) format with a Master Boot Record partition map. It it matters, the USB flash media have USB A connectors, and these are plugged directly into a USB A port on the Mac (so no USB C<->A adapter is involved).

I would have thought the ".img" extension implied this is bootable media, but maybe this doesn't work with Apple silicon.

Thanks in advance for clues on this.

 

[PHolder]

SpinRite, and most of the GRC utilities, is/are written in x64 assembly code, for a "Wintel" machine. There is no support from GRC for any other platform, and that includes Macs, even the x64 ones, let alone the ARM ones. There are work-arounds, involving virtual machines and emulation, but of course they're all technically unsupported by GRC, and you're on your own with whatever support you can get from other users here in the forum. Check some of the other threads here for some of those ideas, or consider picking up a cheap used PC or one of the ZimaBoard PCs that are the ones that Steve used for his development. (That assumes the drives you want to work with are extractable/removable, of course.)

 

[Stev3D]

I’m happy to report that it’s not that hard to run SpinRite on an Apple Silicon Mac — assuming you have a means of getting SpinRite.exe to generate the ISO file (I used VMWare Fusion, but there are many others ways). Following a recommendation I found here:

https://www.spletzer.com/2024/12/running-spinrite-on-apple-silicon/

I used Homebrew to install QEMU <link>, which is an open source emulator. All it takes is a Terminal command like this

sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -drive file=/dev/disk4,format=raw -cdrom /PATH/TO/FILE/SpinRite.iso -boot d

to have an instance of SpinRite running on my M2 MBP [Note: replace /dev/disk4 with the correct drive number, which you can get from Disk Utility]

I bough SpinRite in 2021 to provide my support for Security Now!, knowing that it was unlikely I could ever get it to run for me. As of today, it launches (still running the RAM check for the first time, but I’m optimistic I will benefit from it as much as so many others).

I know I can’t use SpinRite on my internal SDD, but I’ve got a small graveyard of old drives I’d liked to bring back to life. Now I can.

 

[AlanD]

Well, I spoke (wrote) too soon. It isn’t seeing the attached drive. That’s a real disappointment. Back to the drawing board.

That is almost certainly because a machine that new will be UEFI only. It won't have a BIOS, which is what SR needs to see any USB devices.

 

[Stev3D]

I’m happy to report that it’s not that hard to run SpinRite on an Apple Silicon Mac — assuming you have a means of getting SpinRite.exe to generate the ISO file (I used VMWare Fusion, but there are many others ways). Following a recommendation I found here:

https://www.spletzer.com/2024/12/running-spinrite-on-apple-silicon/

I used Homebrew to install QEMU <link>, which is an open source emulator. All it takes is a Terminal command like this

sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -drive file=/dev/disk4,format=raw -cdrom /PATH/TO/FILE/SpinRite.iso -boot d

to have an instance of SpinRite running on my M2 MBP [Note: replace /dev/disk4 with the correct drive number, which you can get from Disk Utility]

I bough SpinRite in 2021 to provide my support for Security Now!, knowing that it was unlikely I could ever get it to run for me. As of today, it launches (still running the RAM check for the first time, but I’m optimistic I will benefit from it as much as so many others).

I know I can’t use SpinRite on my internal SDD, but I’ve got a small graveyard of old drives I’d liked to bring back to life. Now I can.

Well, I spoke (wrote) too soon. It isn’t seeing the attached drive. That’s a real disappointment. Back to the drawing board.

That is almost certainly because a machine that knew will be UEFI only. It won't have a BIOS, which is what SR needs to see any USB devices.

Actually, I was wrong (I just deleted my “I spoke (wrote) too soon” post).

I thought I had attached a 3TB drive, and when the only thing that showed up on the list was 2TB, I assumed it was my internal drive (which I didn’t want to touch right now). As it turns out, the drive I attached was, in fact, 2TB. I just ran a test with a little (16 GB) thumb drive, and that confirmed that I was wrong — that it is, in fact, seeing the an attached USB drive.

The process I used to get it to work on an M2 Mac is anything but “turn-key,” but it really works — and I am thrilled that after purchasing it in 2021, I can finally run SpinRite.