No Partition - No SpinRite(ing)?

[barcleyb]

Hi and Happy Holidays

First post so not totally sure if I’ve done this right!

If a drive has been cleaned in its entirety using Diskpart (clean all command) and subsequently nothing else is done to it, SpinRite 6 (or any of the 6.1 Alphas) will not see the drive, so not able to test the drive before putting a partition on it?

Is this a limitation of SR, am I missing something, is something wrong or something else?

 

[rfrazier]

@barcleyb Welcome aboard. Tell us how the drive is attached to the PC and what type of interface it has. PATA, SATA, PATA via USB, SATA via USB, etc. But, generally, SR should see any drives that the BIOS can see when SR boots freedos. If your PC doesn't have BIOS, then it's above my knowledge level and someone else will have to jump in. I think the drive does have to be initialized as in from Windows Disk Manager, but it shouldn't need to be partitioned or formatted. SR works at the sector level as far as I know.

May your bits be stable and your interfaces be fast. Ron

 

[barcleyb]

Thank you for the welcome

WD Elements USB attached (have tried different ports), detected correctly on boot by system board (for each port tried), using the method described in 6.1 Dev channel to make USB boot drive - so not FreeDOS?

So I've cracked out the old SR6 on FreeDOS combo CD and tried that and still no joy!

I'm guessing this is a USB limitation?

 

[SeanBZA]

Likely USB limitation, try just partitioning the drive and quick format, then see if SR will see it. Might be that the USB enumerator needs to see a valid partition before it passes the info through to the BIOS as there being a drive present.

 

[barcleyb]

Not going in to work any time soon, so will post back here when I have tested

Happy New Year every one

 

[PHolder]

SpinRite 6 and 6.1 does NOT support USB. It does support any disk that is present at boot that the BIOS will handle, so if your USB drive is plugged in and the PC rebooted to BIOS and the BIOS shows the USB disk, then SpinRite has a hope of seeing it and working on it, very slowly. (DOS support is slow.) SpinRite 7.x will support USB directly, but you shouldn't expect that product to enter alpha much before 2024.

 

[peterblaise]

If a drive has been cleaned in its entirety using Diskpart (clean all command) and subsequently nothing else is done to it, SpinRite 6 (or any of the 6.1 Alphas) will not see the drive, so not able to test the drive before putting a partition on it? Is this a limitation of SR, am I missing something, is something wrong or something else?

Let us know how free ValiDrive sees that USB drive. ValiDrive works irrespective of any partitioning, and works under Windows on USB drives. See https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm