SpinRite for vintage PCs

[SidusNare]

Hi,

I work on vintage PCs going back to the IBM 5150. I have bought and use SpinRite 6, and now gotten the 6.1 upgrade, and i see 5 is available still for older machines. While I haven't tried it yet, I suspect 5 won't fit on 360k. Is there a way to get even older versions? I don't know if it's asking for a lot, but I'd love to be able to get all the versions, because the evolution from the first PCs with a 8088 at 4.77Mhz and 256k of ram up to the i9 that can burst to 6Ghz with 192Gb of RAM, there is a lot in between, and sometimes I have to try many different versions of whatever I'm trying to use on it to find one that lines up with it's quirks, whether it's QTPro, memtest, Norton utils, DOS, Windows, Linux, whatever. It would be nice to have more variety in my PC preservation arsenal.

Fred

 

[PHolder]

SpinRite 6.1's EXE is 265K or so, so it seems likely the older version 5 is smaller and so should fit on a floppy for whatever devices you have. You should give it a try, don't you think?

EDIT: I just downloaded it myself, it's 95K.

 

[SidusNare]

6.1's image is 8Meg, it seems to compress well, and I doubt if 6 wouldn't run on a Pentium with 32 meg of ram, I expected 6.1 on an older wouldn't have a better chance.

 

[SidusNare]

I found a note that 5 was the last to run on the 8088, I'll give it a try, but more variety is always preferred.

 

[PHolder]

6.1's image is 8Meg

That's if you let it build its own boot media. (And that is also a bit of a lie, because it makes a drive big enough for extra space for things like logs.) You can just copy the .EXE direct to your own media (even if you need to boot off one media and then switch) and it will run. (It's a dual Windows/DOS executable.)

 

[himemsys]

I use SR5 on my vintage machines. I've not tried it on anything older than a 486, though.

 

[Clev]

Reach out to Spinrite support and Greg can get you an older version.