SpinRite 6.1 in Virtualbox, 2TB Crucial X9

[PhilipC]

I want to say thank you to Steve for SpinRite, and to Scott for posting the how-to, and to Lux Brush for suggesting Level 4. Thanks to you three worthy bitmeisters, I, who have never used a virtual machine in my life, am, right now, running a Level 4 scan in SpinRite 6.1 in VirtualBox 7.0 from the very latest Kubuntu live CD ISO image (installed on a USB thumb drive) on my spanking new Crucial X9 2-terabyte external SSD. Peace of mind is on the way. It’s going relatively slowly though…because my Acer A315-44P laptop has only a USB 3.2 Gen 1 controller, not Gen 2…so, 500 MBps is the highest it is spec’ed to achieve (although the xfce4 disk speed plugin shows frequent bursts of around 680 MBps when reading large files), even though the X9 SSD can deliver 10 GBps on a USB 3.2 Gen 2 or Thunderbolt controller.

SR Level 4 has been running for 1:27:28 as I write this, with an estimated 3:33:52 left to go. Yes, of course I will fstrim the SSD after SR finishes!

My plan is to use the SSD in Fedora (the xfce4 spin) to hold screen capture videos, each about an hour in length. As captured they are between 4 and 6 GB in size. After compressing them in Handbrake, they shrink down to 100-200 MB.

My plan is to format the SSD into 2 partitions: 1.3 TB for ~/Videos, and 0.5 TB for ~/Downloads and a few backup subdirectories e.g. /etc/fonts. Both partitions will have noatime, nodiratime, nodev, nosuid, noauto, and x-gvfs-show specified in their respective lines in /etc/fstab. Filesystem will be ext4 since I don’t plan to ever transfer anything from the SSD to Windows. In fact, the creation with Rufus of the Kubuntu boot USB stick under the installation of Windows 10 which came with the laptop…was the first time I have booted and used Windows in more than 5 years! It took me several minutes to remember how in the blue blazes to change from the A: drive to the C: drive in DOS!

One suggestion to Scott on the instructions: when you say “shutdown” you really mean File-Close-Poweroff the VirtualBox virtual machine. This instruction baffled me for several minutes because there is no obvious “shutdown” button under the Machine menu heading (duh!).

Thanks again to all!

 

[Scott]

One suggestion to Scott on the instructions: when you say “shutdown” you really mean File-Close-Poweroff the VirtualBox virtual machine. This instruction baffled me for several minutes because there is no obvious “shutdown” button under the Machine menu heading (duh!).

If you used my prebuilt VM image, you can type shutdown at the C:\> prompt and it should shutdown the VM.

It’s not in front of me right now but I think I made a shutdown.bat file which runs the fdapm /poweroff command.

 

[PhilipC]

If you used my prebuilt VM image, you can type shutdown at the C:\> prompt and it should shutdown the VM.

It’s not in front of me right now but I think I made a shutdown.bat file which runs the fdapm /poweroff command.

Aha. I did not know this--I did not use your pre-built image. Nevertheless, it worked! Your instructions for making my own image were plenty clear enough for this determined novice to succeed! It took 4 hours and 1 minute for the SpinRite Level 4 scan to complete. Zero errors! Peace of mind! Thank you sir!

I did notice that the last 33% or so of the scan rolled along about twice as fast as the first 50%. I wasn't watching it during the middle 17% or so in between.

Having observed this speedup in the scanning speed as SpinRite raced down the homestretch, I will be curious to see whether or not the second of the two partitions I created (410.16 GiB) reads and writes faster than the first partition (1.22 TiB). I Ieft 204.86 GiB unallocated in the middle, in between the two, as a dead-cells replacement reserve.