SpinRite is frozen when I reattached screen, no log output.

[RedOranges]

I just purchased SpinRite for personal use and started going through my drives at home.

I setup an old system to run SpinRite on some of my drives. On my 3rd drive had the system freeze on me while running. I was running Level 3 on an 2TB SSD.

The screen would be still showing the last screen i was on, but no display would update, the HDD LED on the machine would not be flashing.
Pressing any key would have the system beep and possibly have the HDD LED switch state, a different audio tone if i hit escape, but the screen would not change.
I also tried pressing backspace 5 times as i saw in a different post in an attempt to restart the video display, though I believe that complaint was a black screen rather than stalled.

I had to turn the PC off, and checked the log on the drive, but those two run the log was 0 size.
It happened to me twice on the same drive.

Note, i was unplugging the monitor multiple times since i was sharing it with my main PC, though this was not an issue with the first two drives.


On this run I attached a dedicated monitor, and started the scan just before what was last reported on the frozen "Real-Time Activities" under starting sector.
(it reported 30,887,088, and i started at #30000000)

Is this an anomaly of me disconnecting the screen or something else?

 

[PHolder]

This is probably a case of the BIOS of the machine not doing the "right" thing. You tried the backspace 5 times, and if that didn't work, then you're probably out of luck with that specific hardware. There are other possibilities as well... maybe the computer just hung or froze... maybe the drive itself some how crashed and tied up the system. I don't think SpinRite writes out the log very frequently, because it's caching it in RAM and it doesn't want to slow down the system (or chance any weird interactions in the BIOS.) Perhaps he should offer a command line option to force more log updates (assuming of course there isn't already one, I won't claim to know all of the capabilities of the command line options.)

 

[RedOranges]

Thanks for the reply.

With the dedicated monitor continuously connected I'm at 67% complete now with no issues, where I don't think I got out of 1% range when it failed.

I'm going to take your assumption that this is a BIOS/Video hardware issues with reconnecting displays and not an issue with the software or my harddrive.

 

[AlanD]

If you are likely to do this frequently, and only have a single monitor, it may be worth investing in a KVM switch so that you can share the monitor between devices. The other trick that I sometimes use, my monitor has both VGA and DVI inputs. I connect VGA to one machine and DVI to the other and switch displays by toggling the "Input" switch on the monitor.