Spinrite 6.1 resolves deceptive ECC and Seek Errors reported by Spinrite 6.0

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alphaa10

New member
Jan 22, 2025
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Running Spinrite 6.0 at any level on a certain Western Digital SATA HD (attached to my vintage (2004) Asus MN2E mainboard) always produced a flurry of questionable ECC and seek errors (SMART item 07). Changing the data cable did not help.

Since my Western Digtal OEM diagnostic gave the same drives a "pass" on extended test, I had considered the ECC and seek errors an artifact of SR6.0-- and not an accurate result. The drives themselves produced no speed or data reliability problems before or after the SR6.0 scan at any level.

Now, having upgraded to Spinrite 6.1, the ECC and seek errors no longer appear. Whereas I routinely saw ECC figures as high as several million during a routine SR6.0 scan, the same HD under SR6.1 shows no ECC or seek error problem on any scan level. And while seek errors had been so high under SR6.0 that the red line of excess ran halfway across the horizontal "Current" and "Max" metric, there is now absolutely no red area on the same Seek Error metric. And while Current and Max SMART numbers for seek errors reached a difference of one-to-two, ie. 100/200, there is now no difference between Current and Max under Seek Errors.

Since a SMART item 07 seek error indicates a problem with either a head positioning servo and/or drive medium "expansion" under test, this is very reassuring news. The HD itself is an older WD Black SATA drive (SATA3), model WDC WD1002FAEX-00Z3A0, with power-on hours 20,592, manufactured 2013, and used heavily and regularly.

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UPDATE February 14, 2025
The SMART Seek Error message has reappeared, displaying the value of 100/200 after about five minutes of level 4. it was a surprise to have the horizontal band of blue 200/200 suddenly display red halfway across the band. Another HD utility named Speccy continues to give this HD a clean bill of health on all SMART values.
 
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It's great to compare SpinRite 6 and SpinRite 6.1, confirming what we see, finding anomalies.

But in SpinRite 6, beware of the possible need for DynaStat on drives larger than 549 GB, see https://www.grc.com/sr/kb/b04e.htm for a patch to run each time BEFORE running SpinRite 6 - it's NOT a 'BIOS" error, but a SpinRite 6 error.

I've seen other division overflow errors in SpinRite 6 that have no resolution, so SpinRite 6 has it's limits, and SpinRite 6.1 is definitely the superior program to trust.

See also https://www.grc.com/sr/faq.htm for instructions on getting SpinRite 6 and SpinRite 5, copied here for convenience, it goes out in the email, and is a record if the FAQ page evolves:

How can SpinRite v6.1 owners obtain v6.0 or v5.0?
Although it's increasingly rare for anyone to need diskette recovery, that turned out to be SpinRite v5.0's specialty and to make room for all of v6.1's new technology, all support for floppy diskette recovery was removed from v6.1. So if any SpinRite owner should ever need to recover endangered data from a diskette, nothing known is better able to do that job than SpinRite v5.0. Note that if such recovery is needed, using a diskette drive built into an older PC is superior to using a USB-attached drive. USB will work, but a built-in drive (after cleaning its heads with a floppy drive cleaning disc) is best.
To obtain and download SpinRite v5.0 or v6.0 instead of v6.1, all you need to do is change the filename in the software download link from “spinrite.exe” to “sr5.exe” or “sr6.exe” To do that:
  • Display a fresh copy of your SpinRite v6.1 receipt by entering your SpinRite purchase transaction code into our customer service page.
  • Then, instead of clicking on the page's software download link (which would immediately download a copy of “spinrite.exe” and disabled the single-use link), right-click on the link and select “Copy link address” to copy the link to your Windows clipboard.
  • Next, right-click in your browser's URL address line and select “Paste” to paste the software download link into the address line without using it yet.
  • Now edit the filename end of the URL, changing it from “spinrite.exe” to “sr5.exe” or “sr6.exe”.
  • Finally, press Enter to use that edited URL and retrieve your own individually licensed copy of SpinRite v5.0 or v6.0.
If anything goes wrong you may refresh and reload the receipt page to obtain new fresh links that can be used to download copies of your personally licensed SpinRite versions.

Thanks.
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