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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.
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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!
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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.)
SpinRite 6.1 "may" be able to access an internal NVMe drive as a BIOS drive, but with all the pertinent BIOS limitations (slow BIOS I/O speed, 2.2 TB capacity limitation, etc.).
SpinRite 7.0 will have drivers for NVMe (as well as USB) drives!
That's potentially optimistic Dan. SpinRite 7.x will support a lot of things, but I fully expect SpinRite 7.0 to be a direct port of whatever is current in SpinRite 6.1 into the new codebase based on the new OS. The big benefit of initially moving to SpinRite 7.0 will be support for running on modern machines that do not support legacy booting.
With all due respect, this is no longer correct.
Steve has made it very clear, after the lack of meaningful BIOS USB support in SR 6.1, that SR 7.0 will have native drivers for USB and NVMe.
My acquisition is RTOS-32 changed my roadmap for SpinRite 7.x and I haven't yet made time to update SpinRite's official Roadmap.
Since RTOS-32 already contains its own native drivers for USB and NVMe, I expect that once any code begins to come alive for us, it will be with support for IDE, AHCI, USB and NVMe support!
I've confirmed that I will be needing to modify all of those low-level drivers, since they assume perfect drives and have very simple read/write interfaces with non-specific error returns and no access to any drive metadata. Logically, it's exactly comparable to the BIOS which reads and writes and nothing more. But I'm excited that v7.0 should support everything that's planned for SpinRite.
