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SpinRite v6.1 has been moved to its third release. I don't yet have a "change tracking" page setup since that will be part of the forthcoming SRv6.1 online docs. But here's what's new/fixed/different:

1. Removed the "drive not reporting writes" reporting and added a notice about possible RAM reliability being the cause of any apparent verification failure.
2. Added startup RAM testing to verify transfer safety.
   • Added NORAMTEST command line option.
   • In auto mode, RAM the RAM test runs for 60 seconds then self-cancels unless problem found.
3. Fixed trouble with VIA chipsets
   • Improved detection of missing drives on VIA controllers.
   • Bus Mastering now works 100%
4. Changed interaction between “DYNASTAT 0” and “NoRewrite” so that NoRewrite takes precedence (as it clearly should.)

As always, until SpinRite is formally published (once I get docs online) you can grab it at: GRC's Pre-Release page.

Thanks, Steve. I have some old devices that I'll start testing it with and provide you with feedback if I see anything out of the ordinary.

Feedback for 6.1r3:
-The new RAM testing is a great addition and a good precaution before any disk operations begin.
-I think that there's value in adding a "countdown to completion time" similar to other screens in SR. It would be nice to show the total RAM the app detected, how much was tested, and how much is left to test. It would be great if I could see that I have to wait XX minutes (hours?) before RAM testing is over and I could proceed to SR's main screen.

I have a bunch of known bad and known good HDs and memory cards, so I'll run them all through SRb3.

LLAP

-Ronny

This needs to be highlighted IMHO:
“After waiting a while, press Enter to proceed.”

If you miss it, you could spend hours waiting . That’s the reason for my prior comment. I missed it and waited for 15 mins or so before moving forward.

That's a great point. If the user doesn't read the screen they'll be waiting from something automatic to happen, which never will.

To your earlier points, SpinRite always measures exactly the same amount of RAM, but it's doing so over and over as shown by that counter. Each "count" is one entire measurement.

On boot sr61.img presents FreeCom v0.84, prompts for new date, new time, then goes to C: x> ..... nothing further ... ?

Hi @akjim. It SHOULD boot and run SpinRite. It should have an "autoexec.bat" file which will prevent the prompt for date and time, and it should also have a copy of your spinrite.exe... so I think we need some additional information?

How did you use the sr61.img file to create bootable media? It's meant to be copied to the front of a thumb drive??

G'Morning Steve, I downloaded today's 6.1v3 ... "sr61.zip" to my Mac. Copied that to a FAT32 formated USB stick, unzipped it on the USB stick, deleted the .zip file. Started the PC with that.

After having difficulty with that I downloaded the .exe file and created a bootable USB stick using the original USB stick. This bootable USB is working fine.

Steve said:

It's meant to be copied to the front of a thumb drive??

Click to expand...

I recommend saying "written" or "applied" instead of "copied". If someone just copies the .img file to a flash drive, it won't work. It needs to be written with a program like dd.

akjim said:

After having difficulty with that I downloaded the .exe file and created a bootable USB stick using the original USB stick. This bootable USB is working fine.

Click to expand...

I'm glad you got it working! My original intention was to withhold SpinRite 6.1's release until I have all of its documentation assembled. But after 3.5 years of work on it and so many people patiently waiting, I buckled and made it public. So now we're in a bit of a twilight zone where the code is there but its "how to get it running on your machine" documentation isn't yet written. So it's still a bit of a frontier environment for those with unusual requirements... like yours with a Mac. (I'm delighted to see another Mac running SpinRite!) Thanks!

Steve, Actually I bought a refurb Dell E6350 in order to get an eSATA port in order to mount my wife's video storage HDD that has a corrupt B-tree. I couldn't afford the downtime to run SpinRite on my Mac. Crossing my fingers that your baby works magic .... 8 hours to go....

Well Steve, level2 has completed, reports 100% recovery ... however drive won't mount, fsck reports invalid B-tree node size, exit code 8

Try a level 3 refresh.

Since you are trying to recover data, I recommend cloning the drive before you run Level 3 or higher.

Another great tool for dealing with file system corruption is https://www.r-studio.com

akjim said:

Well Steve, level2 has completed, reports 100% recovery ... however drive won't mount, fsck reports invalid B-tree node size, exit code 8

Click to expand...

The problem is likely true corruption of the file system. SpinRite's roadmap plans to add such capability. But today it's only recovering the underlying physical media, NOT repairing the higher level file system. So you'll need to use a separate tool once the underlying media is solid.

I downloaded (twice) Release #3 and used it to create an ISO image, I then used the Windows Disc Image Burner to burn several different media. Each time I try to boot the media, I am greeted with "bad or missing command interpreter".

lyonadmiral1981 said:

I downloaded (twice) Release #3 and used it to create an ISO image, I then used the Windows Disc Image Burner to burn several different media. Each time I try to boot the media, I am greeted with "bad or missing command interpreter".

Click to expand...

I'll see whether I can follow in your footsteps. But I'm curious why you chose ISO and burning a disc over setting up a bootable USB thumb drive? SpinRite v6.1 now defaults to trying to log, and the logs are much more informative than before. Would booting USB work for you?

Steve said:

I'll see whether I can follow in your footsteps. But I'm curious why you chose ISO and burning a disc over setting up a bootable USB thumb drive? SpinRite v6.1 now defaults to trying to log, and the logs are much more informative than before. Would booting USB work for you?

Click to expand...

My test bench machine is a Latitude E6440 and for whatever reason it will not see the USB SATA dock that is plugged into if I boot off of a SpinRite USB stick, but will be detected if I boot off internal optical media.

Either way, I'm hoping that it may be an isolated incident with my environment and not a larger issue where people can't boot their SpinRite optical media.

Otherwise, I certainly agree, USB sticks all the way, and my tool kit is a very well worn (chrome right off the finish) Kingston SE8 DataTraveler that I've copied all my IT tools onto after SpinRite did its magic to it.

lyonadmiral1981 said:

My test bench machine is a Latitude E6440 and for whatever reason it will not see the USB SATA dock that is plugged into if I boot off of a SpinRite USB stick, but will be detected if I boot off internal optical media.

Either way, I'm hoping that it may be an isolated incident with my environment and not a larger issue where people can't boot their SpinRite optical media.

Otherwise, I certainly agree, USB sticks all the way, and my tool kit is a very well worn (chrome right off the finish) Kingston SE8 DataTraveler that I've copied all my IT tools onto after SpinRite did its magic to it.

Click to expand...

Just 3 days ago I burned an ISO to a CD using standard Windows tools (Win 11), and booted from the CD, and it worked.

I did this because I wanted to see if my Mac could boot from that CD - it couldn’t but I think that’s because I have a bad CD drive on my Mac, not because the CD I made was bad)

Thanks for the confirmation, Scott... but even more, holy crap! — the work you're doing for booting SpinRite in hostile (and previously impossible) environments is astonishing!!

Yes @Steve , it works as I have successfully used in on a SurfacePro 2 (UEFI only), and an HP laptop (in UEFI mode) that has an NVME M.2 drive. ReadSpeed reported improvements with both after running SpinRite. No MAC's here to try it on.

Steve said:

Thanks for the confirmation, Scott... but even more, holy crap! — the work you're doing for booting SpinRite in hostile (and previously impossible) environments is astonishing!!

Click to expand...

Thanks! It's been a fun puzzle to figure out how to turn "it should work" into "here's how to make it work"! Next steps:
1. I'll add Bootable to the native "Booting FreeDOS on a Mac" instructions
2. If I ever get my hands on ARM Mac and/or ARM PC (like some Microsoft Surface devices), I'll add instructions for them. I really doubt that ARM Mac devices will ever be made to work, but I'll try whenever I get the hardware to see if that's so.

Steve said:

I'll see whether I can follow in your footsteps. But I'm curious why you chose ISO and burning a disc over setting up a bootable USB thumb drive? SpinRite v6.1 now defaults to trying to log, and the logs are much more informative than before. Would booting USB work for you?

Click to expand...

Hi Steve, if you had time to attempt, were you able to replicate the issue?

I cannot find a place to download 6.1 from. I have a license for SpinRite 6 from looong ago.

la9ui said:

I cannot find a place to download 6.1 from. I have a license for SpinRite 6 from looong ago.

Click to expand...

See this page: https://www.grc.com/cs/customerservice.htm

Greg S said:

See this page: https://www.grc.com/cs/customerservice.htm

Click to expand...

OK, now I found it.

Hi Steve, using 6.1 on a known failing 4tb western digital HDD with a 3.1 USD hub and when it reached the bad area with level 5, it had marked some of the on-screen blocks with a red B. Not a problem and expected. Then I noticed the dock light for the drive was off but 6.1 was still running. I restarted everything , 6.1 would not exit, but started with level 3 a few % before the bad area. This time no B's in red on-screen but in the rough area of the previous problem area the dock light was off again but 6.1 was still running and displaying it was making good progress through the disk. To confirm, I powered off the USB hub and 6.1 still continued and though it would respond to the left/right and ESC key, I could not cancel and exit, again. Had to power off the PC to restart. Just wanted to report that despite the disk being offline, 6.1 was continuing to function as though the disk was connected. As as I won't use the HDD for live use as it is failing, thought a good test to work with and try out 6.1. Thanks John

Your BIOS might have that USB bug.

I downloaded the new 6.1 with the .img file, dd'ed it to a flash disk and booted it on a pc.
The program launches, presents the into text prompting me to press enter to continue. I am then at the memory check screen at which point it appears the entire PC has locked up. No keyboard inputs at all.
Running a mem test manually with memtest86, I got no memory issues.

Is this a known bug? I have a Gigabyte HT3.0 Motherboard

David P said:

….. I am then at the memory check screen at which point it appears the entire PC has locked up. No keyboard inputs at all.
Running a mem test manually with memtest86, I got no memory issues.

Is this a known bug? I have a Gigabyte HT3.0 Motherboard

Click to expand...

Not a known bug. There is a command line switch to bypass the memory check:
C:\>spinrite noramtest

Start with that and see if you can proceed further and if any other problems arise.

David P said:

No keyboard inputs at all.

Click to expand...

I haven't run the new version, but I think it has a minimum period of ram testing. I was led to believe there was a [countdown] timer of some sort. Did you wait any length of time to see if it was just busy?

I had no activity on the screen what so ever.
I ran it inside a VM (Vmware Workstation 17) just now to see what its supposed to do, and it seems as if it just keeps checking ram indefinitely until you press enter to continue?
I found it strange however that it locked up on me again in the VM when I did a benchmark on a VM harddrive.
Starting to think maybe the flash drive I used may have issues? (Im accessing the disk as a raw disk in VMware, so I am running off the flash disk)
Ill write the image to a different flash drive and see if I get the same results.


Edit: Same results on a different flash drive.
Starting with noramtest gets me past, but I question the reliability of the tool on this system if it cannot past the ram test without locking up.

David P said:

Starting to think maybe the flash drive I used may have issues? (Im accessing the disk as a raw disk in VMware, so I am running off the flash disk)

Edit: Same results on a different flash drive.
Starting with noramtest gets me past, but I question the reliability of the tool on this system if it cannot past the ram test without locking up.

Click to expand...

Running in any virtualization environment is unsupported and not particularly well tested. You’re the first person I’ve seen who’s even attempted running in VMWare. I wrote all the VirtualBox instructions and had good luck on all 4 of my machines under VirtualBox but if I hit a failure point I wouldn’t consider it a SpinRite problem unless it was seen in native mode.

Is your system able to boot FreeDOS natively?

Scott said:

Running in any virtualization environment is unsupported and not particularly well tested. You’re the first person I’ve seen who’s even attempted running in VMWare. I wrote all the VirtualBox instructions and had good luck on all 4 of my machines under VirtualBox but if I hit a failure point I wouldn’t consider it a SpinRite problem unless it was seen in native mode.

Is your system able to boot FreeDOS natively?

Click to expand...

I only opted to run in vmware after it froze multiple times on a physical machine. I wasn't sure if the ram test was supposed to do this or not, so I ran in a vm and found out that no, it was supposed to actually do something on the screen. The system is booting FreeDos for sure because spinrite is actually starting and running.
I have no idea what would cause this system to lockup on the ram test portion. Ram was fine being tested with memtest86

Now that Release 3 is out maybe you should change the prompts that are still pointing everyone (ie Registered users) to the Pre-Release page to download v6.1. The Pre-release page now just shows a generic 404 error, with no guidance as to where to go.

Even the big "v6.1 Release 3" banner at the top of EVERY forum page still instructs people to go to the Pre-Release page [https://www.grc.com/prerelease.htm]." A few posts have been made across the forums directing the confused to the the Customer Service page - so most will eventually find the correct page. But there are multiple links across many threads still pointing people to the Pre-Release page - all resulting in a confusing generic 404 error page. A simple option would be to reinstate a Pre-Release html page with a link to the Customer Service page (and a brief explanation) - or just program an automatic redirect.

DougCuk said:

with no guidance as to where to go.

Click to expand...

Yes, it's a multi-step process to get to the right place from the main page (where there is a banner announcing 6.1) but go here

DougCuk said:

Now that Release 3 is out maybe you should change the prompts that are still pointing everyone (ie Registered users) to the Pre-Release page to download v6.1. The Pre-release page now just shows a generic 404 error, with no guidance as to where to go.

Even the big "v6.1 Release 3" banner at the top of EVERY forum page still instructs people to go to the Pre-Release page [https://www.grc.com/prerelease.htm]." A few posts have been made across the forums directing the confused to the the Customer Service page - so most will eventually find the correct page. But there are multiple links across many threads still pointing people to the Pre-Release page - all resulting in a confusing generic 404 error page. A simple option would be to reinstate a Pre-Release html page with a link to the Customer Service page (and a brief explanation) - or just program an automatic redirect.

Click to expand...

This is on Steve's "To Do" list and is part of the overall GRC website SpinRite 6.1 documentation work remaining to be done.

But first is getting the new GRC email system finished and running.

Steve said:

But I'm curious why you chose ISO and burning a disc over setting up a bootable USB thumb drive?

Click to expand...

I keep seeing this and similar comments. I think the primary reason should be obvious. A disk cost pennies and a thumb cost dollars, and few people have surplus thumbs on hand that can be dedicated to spinrite boot media. Although I have to admit the thumb alternative seems to be much more reliable as a bootable media.

Dear Steve,

First of all, thanks for the awesome software! I finally am a SpinRite owner, and it did me good already.

However, I think I should tell you about some issues I've experienced with SpinRite 6.1 rel. 3 yesterday. My machine is based on an ASUS P8Z77-V LE Plus motherboard that has 7 SATA ports on it, 6 of them provided by Intel Z77 controller (2 x SATA 3, 4 x SATA 2), and one SATA 3 by a Marvel controller. Yesterday, as I first booted into SpinRite, I had my OCZ Vertex4 256 GB solid-state drive plugged into the Marvel port, and my 2 TB Western Digital WD20EARX spinner plugged into one of the Intel SATA 3 ports, a configuration that served me well for almost 10 years.

As SpinRite started detecting drives, it hanged after detecting the spinner, and, after waiting for about 15 minutes, I had to resort to a three-finger-salute. I tried again, and this time I watched the same screen (photo attached) for about 30 minutes; after that, even my keyboard went unresponsive (to a point of NumLock LED not lighting up), so i had to power-cycle the machine.

At this point I found that my system would no longer boot from the SSD. I had to plug it into the spare Intel SATA 3 port to even have it detected, and I had to re-install the UEFI bootloader to make my system bootable again. In this configuration, with both drives on the Intel controller, SpinRite correctly detects both drives and is able to work with them.

I'm still not sure whether my Marvel controller went completely FUBAR, or I can still make it usable somehow. I'm also not sure if it was SpinRite that caused the controller to die, or it was just a coincidence. However, since I have no spare P8Z77-V LE Plus motherboard to reproduce the issue, I thought I should make you aware of it just in case.

I keep getting a error 404 ( page not found ) when I click on the GRC's Pre-Release page. I tried various locations where this link is found which includes Steve's April post where he announced the release of the new version. What gives?

Keith S. said:

I keep getting a error 404 ( page not found ) when I click on the GRC's Pre-Release page. I tried various locations where this link is found which includes Steve's April post where he announced the release of the new version. What gives?

Click to expand...

That was moved to the Upgrade page.

Scott said:

Running in any virtualization environment is unsupported and not particularly well tested. You’re the first person I’ve seen who’s even attempted running in VMWare. I wrote all the VirtualBox instructions and had good luck on all 4 of my machines under VirtualBox but if I hit a failure point I wouldn’t consider it a SpinRite problem unless it was seen in native mode.

Is your system able to boot FreeDOS natively?

Click to expand...

I'm also running SR 6.1 on a VM (Hyper-V)... Getting past the memory test is not a problem, but I keep getting errors when it looking to identify the drive. I've used SR 6.0 on Hyper-V for years and didn't have any of these problems. BTW ... this Drive is connected via USB-C and is OFFLINE on Windows and added as a physical drive to the VM.

One of the errors is: "SpinRite is attempting to confirm this drive data transfer safety" it just sits on this red warning box for quite some time (~1hour) ... I've walked away for a while and sometimes if comes back, identifies both partitions on this 1TB drive but won't scan it. Is this normal behavior for SR 6.1?

fnap22 said:

One of the errors is: "SpinRite is attempting to confirm this drive data transfer safety" it just sits on this red warning box for quite some time (~1hour) ... I've walked away for a while and sometimes if comes back, identifies both partitions on this 1TB drive but won't scan it. Is this normal behavior for SR 6.1?

Click to expand...

No it isn’t. SR 6.0 always used the BIOS to communicate with the drives, but 6.1 has native drivers to talk to AHCI and IDE controllers. Maybe those drivers don’t like Hyper-V.

Try starting SpinRite 6.1 with the forcebios command line switch.

Scott said:

No it isn’t. SR 6.0 always used the BIOS to communicate with the drives, but 6.1 has native drivers to talk to AHCI and IDE controllers. Maybe those drivers don’t like Hyper-V.

Try starting SpinRite 6.1 with the forcebios command line switch.

Click to expand...

Thanks for your quick response Scott. I did try it again with the forcebios switch and it's working fine now. It did warn me that I'll take a major performance hit as a result. At least it's working now and drives were identified in seconds. The problem is that it now shows that is estimating that it will take "94" hours to do a L3 scan on a 1TB drive. It would be nice if I could really see and take advantage of the performance enhancements in SR 6.1.

If I have time I will try this again on a spare physical computer to see how it behaves.

Thanks
-Fino

Physical hardware always trumps virtual.

fnap22 said:

BTW ... this Drive is connected via USB-C and is OFFLINE on Windows and added as a physical drive to the VM.

Click to expand...

That's where the problem is. If the drive is USB connected, SR6.1 can only see it as a BIOS device, and it will be limited to BIOS type speeds. The speed advantages of 6.1 are only for AHCI or SATA drives.

AlanD said:

That's where the problem is. If the drive is USB connected, SR6.1 can only see it as a BIOS device, and it will be limited to BIOS type speeds. The speed advantages of 6.1 are only for AHCI or SATA drives.

Click to expand...

But… in VirtualBox (and I assume VMWare), you can map any type of drive that the host can see to an AHCI or IDE adapter, and SpinRite can use its native drivers to addressntye drive.

Steve said:

SpinRite v6.1 has been moved to its third release. I don't yet have a "change tracking" page setup since that will be part of the forthcoming SRv6.1 online docs. But here's what's new/fixed/different:

1. Removed the "drive not reporting writes" reporting and added a notice about possible RAM reliability being the cause of any apparent verification failure.
2. Added startup RAM testing to verify transfer safety.
   • Added NORAMTEST command line option.
   • In auto mode, RAM the RAM test runs for 60 seconds then self-cancels unless problem found.
3. Fixed trouble with VIA chipsets
   • Improved detection of missing drives on VIA controllers.
   • Bus Mastering now works 100%
4. Changed interaction between “DYNASTAT 0” and “NoRewrite” so that NoRewrite takes precedence (as it clearly should.)

As always, until SpinRite is formally published (once I get docs online) you can grab it at: GRC's Pre-Release page.

Click to expand...

@Steve ,

I'm now the editor of the AskWoody Newsletter. We are currently reviewing SpinRite v6.1 and we have some concerns about the results. I do not want to share this information publicly because of uncertainty about our evaluation methods, so a private channel is preferred. This relates to SSDs.

Will

We have not spoken or written in years, so this reminder: Will Fastie, ex of Creative Computing, PC Tech Journal, Zif-Davis, etc. You have my contact info in your customer database or check fastie.com/about. I'll provide information about our reviewer.

Will Fastie said:

You have my contact info in your customer database or check fastie.com/about. I'll provide information about our reviewer.

Click to expand...

I recommend reaching out to him through email. He may not see your message here.

Will Fastie said:

We are currently reviewing SpinRite v6.1 and we have some concerns about the results.

Click to expand...

FYI: SpinRite 6.1 is currently at Release 4 (the final release) which fixes issues in Release 3.

Thanks guys!

My guess is that their reviewer's testing of SpinRite with an SSD fully "untrimmed" the drive, resulting in apparently much slower post-SpinRite operation & benchmarking. As we know, this will be an issue until the drive is returned to an OS where it's file system can be used to retrim the drive. (And it will also be an issue until we get to SpinRite 7. )

I've reached out to Will so I'm on it!

Alice said:

That won't affect read-only benchmarking.

Click to expand...

That actually will affect it, as the read will tell the drive that this LBA unit is in active use, and thus is not part of an impending TRIM operation, as the data has been read. The drive merely keeps a list of LBA units that it has been told are not in use, as a way to have blocks it can simply erase and reuse, while not needing to first read the block, erase the whole erase unit whatever it is, then write the modified block back to that area. The reads set that this block, with the drive itself not caring about any filesystem structure higher up, has potentially valid data, so it will have to wait for a TRIM aware filesystem to mount the drive, and do a periodic scan of the entire directory structure, and see the blocks that have been marked as deletable, and tell the drive to TRIM them, which will mean the drive will use that space for storage by erasing the block on disk, then store the new data, without attempting to keep the data anywhere in that block. this will be in an internal table, which is invisible to the OS itself to a great part.

Alice said:

Typically the Spinrite before and after benchmarks are done on un-trimmed drive, and typically they show improvement.

Click to expand...

Yes!

Note: Before SpinRite the drive's firmware knows that unused areas are empty and returns all zeroes on a read without actually reading them. After SpinRite the drive's firmware now knows that "something" has been written there and thus actually reads and returns all zeros for empty space. Hence an apparent decrease in performance for these areas. Until the drive is subsequently re-trimmed.

But used areas will typically show performance improvement with SpinRite.