Running Spinrite on a suspected bad Mac hard drive (spinner)

[Dharma]

I’m using Spinrite 6.1 on a Win-11 PC. Can I use it to check a suspected bad 1TB spinner that came out of a Mac? I tried a data recovery level 2 and a maintenance level 3 (I think). They both say “The drive has just taken itself offline. The drive is now returning Device Fault status”. Does this mean the disc is bad or is this just a Mac thing?

 

[DanR]

SpinRite is OS (and file system) agnostic. SpinRite works on a low level sector by sector access. So, it will not matter where the drive came from.

It sounds like this drive is troubled and cannot tolerate SpinRite's normal (and now too aggressive) behavior.

There is something you can try however:

Run SpinRite with the ForceBIOS switch: spinrite forcebios

This will force SpinRite to access the drive thru the BIOS with only a 127 block transfer size - a much gentler approach.
It will be MUCH slower however. So please be patient!

Note: It is possible the drive may be too bad for this too work.

 

[Dharma]

Thanks Dan

 

[PHolder]

The drive is now returning Device Fault status

This sounds like the drive is properly communicating with SpinRite, but that the message it's sending is akin to "I'm not well enough to do what you're requesting."

Does it try at all, and eventually stop, or does it fail right at the start? If it tries but eventually fails, then you might try different starting points in the SpinRite UI. Press SHIFT-Enter (when prompted on screen) to adjust the starting and stopping point.

 

[Dharma]

It tries for several minutes and then prompts the message. The graphic display shows SpinRite working on the very first sector and doesn’t move on to the next little block. I assume the blocks represent sectors. I’m new at this.

 

[AlanD]

The block do represent sectors, but not a single sector. IIRC there are 640 blocks in total, so each one represents (number of sectors on disk/640). On a large disk, one block may be several hundred sectors.

It sounds as if the first sector might be faulty, try pressing Shift and Enter before you start the SR run, and select a starting point of, say 1%. That might run cleanly and show that the problem is only on the first (few) sectors. If the boot sector has failed, there are tools which can try to repair it.

 

[ColbyBouma]

IIRC there are 640 blocks in total

1,008.

 

[Tazz]

Shift+Enter to change starting point was changed to the "TAB" key.
I still catch myself hitting those keys as my brain is telling me that it won't work.

After selecting the drive to work on with the Spacebar press "Enter".
On the next screen use the "TAB" key to change the starting and/or ending point.