First I'd like to say hello to the community as this is my first post on the forum, even though I've been a listener of Security Now since the mid/late 2000's
As mentioned in the title I recently purchased a SSK SD301 256GB thumb drive from Amazon. The drive came formatted as exFAT and boasts amazing read and write speeds according to the marketing and reviews, so I thought it might make a great SpinRite boot drive. Having read more about how SpinRite works, that assumption may have been incorrect as other factors directly relate to SpinRite's speed.
Regardless when I went to install SpinRite onto this new USB drive I noticed it was taking quite a bit longer than it has in the past. Particularly in the step "Bringing the drive back online". The install ultimately failed (I didn't capture the exact error message, my bad) and the drive never mounted again in Windows. I tried a Windows 11 laptop I had sitting around and same issue (audible tone from the machine that something was plugged in, but drive never appears in disk management, file explorer, device manager, etc).
So I tried a MacBook Pro (Intel 2019) I also have and no joy seeing the drive in any of its disk utilities or using a few commands from the terminal (I know the filesystem SpinRite was attempting to write wouldn't be compatible with the Mac without special software, but I just wanted to see if it could even see the drive partition).
Finally I tried connecting it on my Windows 10 pc again but this time to a Virtual Machine running in VMware Workstation running Ubuntu 18.04. One ray of hope sparked when I plugged the drive in and VMware Workstation asked me did I want to connect the usb device to the Windows host or Virtual Machine. I opted for virtual machine as I wanted to see if linux had better luck seeing the drive. No joy, just a slew of output from dmesg with things like:
usb 1-2-port1: unable to enumerate USB device
device descriptor read/64, error 18
At this point I began to just suspect drive failure but I wanted to make sure the same thing wouldn't happen to the replacement drive they are shipping me. I know crap all about storage and non-UEFI BIOS DOS Operating Systems, so I guess I just wanted to know if there was a chance that this drive could just be incompatible with installing the DOS OS needed for SpinRite to run somehow.
Thanks Steve and the community for an amazing piece of software!!! Look forward to the many revisions to come.
-Thomas
As mentioned in the title I recently purchased a SSK SD301 256GB thumb drive from Amazon. The drive came formatted as exFAT and boasts amazing read and write speeds according to the marketing and reviews, so I thought it might make a great SpinRite boot drive. Having read more about how SpinRite works, that assumption may have been incorrect as other factors directly relate to SpinRite's speed.
Regardless when I went to install SpinRite onto this new USB drive I noticed it was taking quite a bit longer than it has in the past. Particularly in the step "Bringing the drive back online". The install ultimately failed (I didn't capture the exact error message, my bad) and the drive never mounted again in Windows. I tried a Windows 11 laptop I had sitting around and same issue (audible tone from the machine that something was plugged in, but drive never appears in disk management, file explorer, device manager, etc).
So I tried a MacBook Pro (Intel 2019) I also have and no joy seeing the drive in any of its disk utilities or using a few commands from the terminal (I know the filesystem SpinRite was attempting to write wouldn't be compatible with the Mac without special software, but I just wanted to see if it could even see the drive partition).
Finally I tried connecting it on my Windows 10 pc again but this time to a Virtual Machine running in VMware Workstation running Ubuntu 18.04. One ray of hope sparked when I plugged the drive in and VMware Workstation asked me did I want to connect the usb device to the Windows host or Virtual Machine. I opted for virtual machine as I wanted to see if linux had better luck seeing the drive. No joy, just a slew of output from dmesg with things like:
usb 1-2-port1: unable to enumerate USB device
device descriptor read/64, error 18
At this point I began to just suspect drive failure but I wanted to make sure the same thing wouldn't happen to the replacement drive they are shipping me. I know crap all about storage and non-UEFI BIOS DOS Operating Systems, so I guess I just wanted to know if there was a chance that this drive could just be incompatible with installing the DOS OS needed for SpinRite to run somehow.
Thanks Steve and the community for an amazing piece of software!!! Look forward to the many revisions to come.
-Thomas
