Does SpinRite require a hard drive to be fully formatted before recognition.....

[JimB]

Reason for asking is I have a stack of HGST 2.5 drives that were all totally raw, no file system that had to be initialized and formatted. If the quick format (GPT) is used you get a HEALTHY (Basic Data Partition) immediately in Windows but partition 2 of that drive is still formatting. In this state if you eject the drive it's not recognized by SpinRite. So my guess is fully formatted is required. Yes or no.



Cheers!

 

[PHolder]

SpinRite 6 will work on Windows formatted drives to write the log onto the same drive it's processing (which I personally dislike, but I get the appeal.) It's from 2003 so it will therefor only recognize MBR formatted partitions, but it will also work on RAW (unpartitioned) drives.

SpinRite 6.1 does not care what is on the drive at all, and makes no attempt to understand the partition table whatsoever. It writes it's logs (if enabled) to the boot device, if writable.

 

[DanR]

Reason for asking is I have a stack of HGST 2.5 drives that were all totally raw, no file system that had to be initialized and formatted. If the quick format (GPT) is used you get a HEALTHY (Basic Data Partition) immediately in Windows but partition 2 of that drive is still formatting. In this state if you eject the drive it's not recognized by SpinRite. So my guess is fully formatted is required. Yes or no.

To be more specific, the answer is NO! SpinRite 6.x is OS agnostic. The OS on the drive , or lack of it, is irrelevant to SpinRite 6.x.

SpinRite 6.0 is NOT compatible with GPT formatting. It cannot see such drives. It will be fine with raw un-formatted drives however.

SpinRite 6.1 IS FULLY COMPATIBLE with GPT formatted drives. SpinRite 6.1 will run on those drives just fine, as well as on raw un-formatted drives.

 

[JimB]

To be more specific, the answer is NO! SpinRite 6.x is OS agnostic. The OS on the drive , or lack of it, is irrelevant to SpinRite 6.x.

SpinRite 6.0 is NOT compatible with GPT formatting. It cannot see such drives. It will be fine with raw un-formatted drives however.

SpinRite 6.1 IS FULLY COMPATIBLE with GPT formatted drives. SpinRite 6.1 will run on those drives just fine, as well as on raw un-formatted drives.

Thank you. Found the GPT issue independently.

Last question. There is a facility to log to either diskette or LPT.....is the diskette option stand alone in the fact that it checks for a formatted DOS disk and finding no formatting, formats it then writes to it or does it just then fail? I don't have any PCs with a 3.5, 1.44mb , but could provision one of the Win boxes with one and format from there if necessary ( screwed around all day yesterday trying to get one to mount in a Linux environment only to be told it's not a valid block device when every Linux query from various command line tests says it is....).

 

[PHolder]

checks for a formatted

The user manual doesn't speak to your question, but for SpinRite 6, I would assume the logging device needs to refer to a valid drive letter. This would imply, if using a floppy, that it would need to be formatted. You could do that from FreeDOS itself.

I think you might be better off using SpinRite 6.1, which has different behaviour, and by default logs into a sub-directory on the boot device (usually a USB flash drive.)

 

[AlanD]

Last question. There is a facility to log to either diskette or LPT.....is the diskette option stand alone in the fact that it checks for a formatted DOS disk and finding no formatting, formats it then writes to it or does it just then fail?

IIRC, with SR 6.0, the options were to log to the BOOT diskette, or LPT:. I don't think it was an option to log to any A:/ or B:/, just the boot drive if it was booted from floppy.