Spinrite 6.1 doesn't detect 2TB Kingston NVME drive - but BIOS and Windows 11 do

[fnap22]

Hello,

I've been running Spinrite (SR) for past 16+ years and more recently SR 6.1 since it was released and love it. I just added a Kingston NVME M.2 2TB drive to my system, but for some reason SR doesn't recognize it. (refer image below)

Additional information: I just installed the NVME drive and first thing I wanted to do before using it was to run SR at Level-3. When I check from the BIOS settings it show that the drive is detected, but when I run SR it detects all my other drives, including my other 500GB NVME drive. (refer image below)

Before I gave up on the drive and returned it, I booted up my Windows 11 system and sure enough it had no problem in detecting the drive. I was able to format it and did some test copies by writing ~750GB of data to it without any issues and performance on the drive was very good (for my PCIe 3.0 MB), as I was getting up to 950 MB/Sec while writing to the NVME drive.

Any thoughts as to why SR 6.1 isn't recognizing my new NVME drive? Ideally even if I can't get SR to run on it now, I'd like to try to run a level-3 test at some point down the road (I know not too often though )?

 

[PHolder]

Any thoughts as to why SR 6.1 isn't recognizing my new NVME drive?

SpinRite does not have NVMe drivers and so would rely on FreeDOS to have support, which it does not. There is no realistic way to do a proper test, but you could read up on some of the virtual machine options and maybe get it working (or maybe not, it would require the VM hypervisor to play monkey in the middle translating the necessary requests from FreeDOS to the host OS.)

Spinrite 7.x is due to have inbuilt support for NVMe, but there is no schedule on when it will arrive, just guesses that start with 2026 and go up from there. (Also note that SpinRite 7.x is not expected to be a free upgrade from 6.x .)

 

[ColbyBouma]

SpinRite does not have native support for NVMe. They can show up as BIOS drives on some motherboards, but on others they just don't show up.

Have you tried SpinRite again since formatting the drive? Sometimes motherboards won't show drives to SpinRite unless they show up in the list of boot options.

 

[fnap22]

SpinRite does not have native support for NVMe. They can show up as BIOS drives on some motherboards, but on others they just don't show up.

Have you tried SpinRite again since formatting the drive? Sometimes motherboards won't show drives to SpinRite unless they show up in the list of boot options.

Not quite sure I understand. I have successfully run SR 6.1 on my 500GB Kingston NVME as well as on several other no name 4TB NVME drives. It's just this 2TB Kinston NVME that it is not recognizing, so when you refer to drivers how would it be that the others (ever from same vendor) work? Are you just speculating or do you know for sure?

 

[ColbyBouma]

Are you just speculating or do you know for sure?

https://www.grc.com/sr/faq.htm

What are SpinRite’s limitations with USB & NVMe drives?


Since we were unable to incorporate native support for USB & NVMe drives into SpinRite 6.1 (which future releases of SpinRite will have), SpinRite v6.1 continues to use the system’s BIOS firmware to access USB and NVMe drives. The use of the BIOS may impose limitations on drive size and performance which low-level device drivers will not have. USB drives in external enclosures often contain standard SATA drives. So if the recovery of data from such a drive is critical, and if it is feasible to remove a drive from its enclosure to directly attach it to a standard SATA port, the BIOS can be bypassed and SpinRite will be able to access the entire drive natively and at the drive’s maximum speed.


Although USB was designed for “hot plugging”, where drives may be attached and removed at any time, BIOS firmware has never supported this convenience. Therefore, it is necessary to attach any USB drives to the computer before the system is booted. This will allow the BIOS to discover those drives at boot time so that they will be available to SpinRite.

 

[PHolder]

NVME

What does this mean to you "NVMe"? I suspect it may mean the form factor and not the signalling technology to you. NVMe is actually a protocol, not a form factor. The form factor is actually M.2 (in most cases anyway) and it's possible to get drives that support SATA in the M.2 form factor, which means such a drive is not actually a NVMe drive. I suppose it's even possible that some drives can do either. This seems like the best explanation for why some of your drives worked and others did not.

 

[ColbyBouma]

His first screenshot shows SpinRite detecting his 500 GB NVMe drive. I suspect the issue with the 2 TB drive is something like that it wasn't formatted so the BIOS didn't add it to the list of boot options, or maybe that motherboard can't present more than 1 NVMe drive to SpinRite at once. You may have to temporarily remove the 500 GB drive.

 

[fnap22]

His first screenshot shows SpinRite detecting his 500 GB NVMe drive. I suspect the issue with the 2 TB drive is something like that it wasn't formatted so the BIOS didn't add it to the list of boot options, or maybe that motherboard can't present more than 1 NVMe drive to SpinRite at once. You may have to temporarily remove the 500 GB drive.

Thank you both for the feedback and suggestions. I’ve tried running SR again and it now does in fact recognize the 2TB Kingston NVME drive just like it did with the others that have tried. I’m running SR now at level 3 and Should be finished in ~7-8 hours.

Looks like it may have had something to do with the fact that it hadn’t been formatted but not sure I understand why, considering SR doesn’t rely on underlying filesystem. I’ll take it regardless.
Thanks again!

 

[DanR]

ooks like it may have had something to do with the fact that it hadn’t been formatted but not sure I understand why, considering SR doesn’t rely on underlying filesystem.

Correct. SpinRite does NOT care. But: The BIOS might care.