Fixes: “This drive has taken itself OFFLINE and cannot be used”
This improvement to SpinRite will hopefully resolve “false positive” occurrences of those big red “This drive has taken itself OFFLINE and cannot be used” messages. This could still happen, but now it should be much more rare and only when the drive has really dropped offline.
Tests performed over the weekend revealed that for some drives, SpinRite's patient wait of 10 seconds was not long enough. So SpinRite was declaring that a drive had gone offline just before it came back online. I found some drives that needed more than 10 seconds following a reset to get ready to continue. So from now on, SpinRite will wait up to 60 seconds after resetting a drive following an error before it gives up and decides that the drive is never going to return to use.
Since 60 seconds is a Loooooooong time to wait with nothing apparently happening, after SpinRite has waited for just one second, it will now post a "countdown" in the upper left corner of the screen while it's patiently waiting for the drive to come back online:
So... I would very much appreciating having all pre-release SpinRite testers who experienced that pop-up, give the improved “SRPR.EXE” release a test and report (a) whether this resolved the trouble and (b) what you found at the end of the log for the longest drive reset recovery time.
You can obtain this update as before by going to GRC's Pre-Release page, entering your SpinRite license serial number or transaction code and clicking the link to obtain your personal pre-release copy. You'll see that this release identifies itself as “pre-release 5.01”. This is meant to signify that it follows release candidate #5, but that it is not yet another release candidate since I'll be adding additional improvements in the coming days.
Let me/us know whether that solves the trouble you were seeing!
Thanks!
