SpinRite FAQ ‑ Frequently Asked Questions
This page will be created shortly. Suggestions for its contents may be posted in the thread below and as they are considered they will be moved into this main body of the FAQ.
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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.)
A Dell XPS 8960 PC is a Win 11 PC that is UEFI boot only. As such, it cannot run SpinRite 6.1.
There is a free tool, BootAble, to check this before buying SpinRite.
SpinRite comes with a "No questions asked" quick refund if desired. Just contact customer support.
https://www.grc.com/cs/customerservice.htm
I'm going to guess there is a communication barrier here, as memory normally refers to RAM memory, but I think you're referring to a flash USB storage device or similar?
In any case, many modern PCs do NOT support booting into the legacy BIOS at all. This is a general trend in hardware, which SpinRite is a bit behind on. SpinRite 7 will address this in the future, but there is no schedule for when. (Or more specifically it will happen when it happens.) There is the utility from GRC called Bootable which is designed to help you test if you can configure your hardware to do a legacy boot. https://www.grc.com/bootable.htm
Some things that can be done: You may have to disable secure boot, but if it's enabled and you also use Windows drive encryption (Bitlocker, which can be enabled without you realizing it) you NEED to get a copy of your drive encryption key and have it on hand to re-enable secure boot later. After disabling secure boot, then you would need to enable the CSM (compatibility support module) in the BIOS. This basically supplies the legacy BIOS capability to the UEFI infrastructure (which is what "modern" boot is based on.) If you can't find CSM in your motherboard configuration, you will not be able to get legacy boot to work. Your final option would the be to check out any option for executing SpinRite in a virtual machine, as is documented elsewhere in these forums.
Does SpinRite (6.1 r4) mark bad sectors as bad (similar to chkdsk does)? And how does that work? Criteria? When is a bad sector marked as bad and when not?
Can a "table banger" drive (from a user that didn't know that rotating drives are sensitive to and damaged by vibrations), that is now out of re-allocation space, be made to any use?
PS I'd love the "dd" USB media creation, a fake (diskutil unmount /dev/diskX && dd if=spinrite.img of=/dev/diskX) one-line command on the download page would be a time saver for me as an infrequent dd user
Can a "table banger" drive (from a user that didn't know that rotating drives are sensitive to and damaged by vibrations), that is now out of re-allocation space, be made to any use?
PS I'd love the "dd" USB media creation, a fake (diskutil unmount /dev/diskX && dd if=spinrite.img of=/dev/diskX) one-line command on the download page would be a time saver for me as an infrequent dd user
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SpinRite, in its default configuration will attempt recovery on a sector, but ultimately, recovered or not, it rewrites data to it. It then becomes up to the drive's firmware to make the decision on how to react to the write request. I don't know if it's known what the drive would do in this case if it were out of re-allocation space. I think either many drives silently fail the writes or SpinRite doesn't check for or report on these failures. (@Steve should comment specifically on this, either here or in the official FAQ on the site.)
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