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DNS Benchmark v2 is Finished and Available! Guest:
That's right. It took an entire year, but the result far more accurate and feature laden than we originally planned. The world now has a universal, multi-protocol, super-accurate, DNS resolver performance-measuring tool. This major second version is not free. But the deal is, purchase it once for $9.95 and you own it — and it's entire future — without ever being asked to pay anything more. For an overview list of features and more, please see The DNS Benchmark page at GRC. If you decide to make it your own, thanks in advance. It's a piece of work I'm proud to offer for sale. And if you should have any questions, many of the people who have been using and testing it throughout the past year often hang out here.
/Steve. -
Be sure to checkout “Tips & Tricks” Dear Guest Visitor → Once you register and log-in please checkout the “Tips & Tricks” page for some very handy tips!
/Steve. -
BootAble – FreeDOS boot testing freeware
To obtain direct, low-level access to a system's mass storage drives, SpinRite runs under a GRC-customized version of FreeDOS which has been modified to add compatibility with all file systems. In order to run SpinRite it must first be possible to boot FreeDOS.
GRC's “BootAble” freeware allows anyone to easily create BIOS-bootable media in order to workout and confirm the details of getting a machine to boot FreeDOS through a BIOS. Once the means of doing that has been determined, the media created by SpinRite can be booted and run in the same way.
The participants here, who have taken the time to share their knowledge and experience, their successes and some frustrations with booting their computers into FreeDOS, have created a valuable knowledgebase which will benefit everyone who follows.
You may click on the image to the right to obtain your own copy of BootAble. Then use the knowledge and experience documented here to boot your computer(s) into FreeDOS. And please do not hesitate to ask questions – nowhere else can better answers be found.
(You may permanently close this reminder with the 'X' in the upper right.)
NOT SpinRite.
One block = 32,768 sectors.
Times a default of up to 5 minutes of DynaStat
attempted recovery for each sector.
32,768 sectors x 5 minutes = 163,840 minutes
/ 60 minutes per hour = 2,730.67 hours
/ 24 hours per day = 113.78 days.
Per bad block.
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Alternatively, starting with the command line:
SPINRITE DYNASTAT 0. . . 'wastes' NO TIME trying to recover, instead,
SpinRite just barges on through at whatever
rate the drive can accept rewrite requests -
great for drives where we no longer care about
the contents.
Or:
SPINRITE DYNASTAT 1. . . spends up to ONE MINUTE on each sector,
limiting a 32,768 block to 'only' 22 days
recovery. ;-)
The USER decides what to do.
SpinRite can't read our mind.
SpinRite, in your case, is having a hard enough
time trying to read the drive! =8^o
Tell us more about the drive, share a SpinRite
log.
Yes. DynaStat. Via the command line. C:\>spinrite dynastat x
From SpinRite's Help (SpinRite Help or SpinRite ?)
By default, SpinRite will work for up to 5 minutes when acquiring up to 2000 individual sector samples when it is attempting to recover data from each absolutely unreadable sector. This command (see examples below) sets the maximum number of minutes to allow DynaStat more or less time to recover absolutely unreadable sectors from 0 (no data recovery) to 99 minutes
So, you could try x = 4, 3, 2, or 1 for progressively less recovery effort/time.
If data recovery is NOT a concern, then C:\>spinrite dynastat 0 would do no data recovery for best scan time. Unreadable sectors would be written with all zeros. If the unreadable sector is also unwritable then the drive firmware would typically reallocate the bad sector.
Don't forget that you can interrupt it, and restart and a position further along the drive (by command line or by using the inputs in the UI.) This would allow you to see if the drive gets better further on, and then decided how to handle any known bad spots later on (by jumping directly to them.) The relevant LBA#'s should be in your logs. (You can see a portion of your logs in memory by changing screens with the arrow left/right.)
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