SpinRite is a disk maintenance utility. Its main use is with hard drives, but it can also be used with floppies and removable media such as Jaz and Zip drives. It is similar to Scandisk in that it, like Scandisk, searches your hard drive for disk surface problems. But it does much more than Scandisk. Ideally, you should verify the logical file system structure of the disk using Scandisk and then switch to SpinRite to scan the disk surface. Here is a quote from the SpinRite web site.

"Running SpinRite periodically prevents disk crashes by containing any problems that are discovered. SpinRite examines the data storage surface of a drive one region at a time. It first reads the data out of a region, then exercises that region with patterns of data that SpinRite has determined are the most difficult for the drive to read and write. In this way, any weak and failing areas within the region are located and removed from use while none of the drive's original data is being stored there. Only after the region has been made absolutely safe, will the drive's original data be restored to that area. This crucial process of testing the surface of a drive while it contains data is completely unique to SpinRite."

When your hard drive has trouble reading or writing data that in the past caused no problem, you may not at first notice it, since the drive will retry the read many times if it has trouble getting a good read the first time on some data. So if it finally gets the data, it proceeds as if there is no problem, and you know nothing about it. When things get bad enough that you finally notice something is wrong, if you are lucky the drive will still function well enough for you to back it up or at least get all your important data off it. If you are not so lucky, then you may wish that you had used SpinRite regularly. Again, quoting from the web site:

Even when there is damage to the disk, SpinRite claims to recover much, if not all, of the data in a damaged sector. It does this using its DynaStat Data Recovery method to reconstruct the "lost" data. Don’t confuse this with recovering lost files due to deletion or a virus, for which a program like PowerQuest‘s Lost & Found is useful. This is recovery of data that is "lost" due to the difficulty in reading that particular sector of the drive.

You run SpinRite from a floppy disk which has been formatted with the system files. Simply add SpinRite.exe to the floppy, boot from this floppy, then type in SpinRite.exe at the DOS prompt, and the program takes over from there.

When the program starts, it first analyzes your hard drive and gathers information about the drive’s characteristics by running such tests as an integrity test, viral infection test, ram test, revolutions/minute test, physical intersection angle (didn‘t know there was such a thing did you?), and many more.

For example, on my ThinkPad 233 with an approximate 3.2 GB hard drive it noted that the drive was performing an average of 4,201.49 revolutions/minute and had a physical intersection angle of 2.43 degrees. The partition information for the C partition was a sector size of 512, 8 sectors/cluster and 4,096 bytes per cluster. It also gave benchmarks for drive access time.

After the initial disk analysis, SpinRite starts its real work.

There are various levels of disk analysis/repair. I chose level four (locate surface defects). This process took about 8.5 hours to process the 2,098 MB C partition. It took another 5 hours to do the 1,1152 MB D partition. Both partitions were FAT 32. No errors were found. That is what you use SpinRite for—Peace of mind. If you need that comfort, get SpinRite.

You can view one of seven screens while this is going on, including one that looks like the detail view when Scandisk is running. Everything is happening so fast, screens like the Surface Analysis Monitor flash their changing information so quickly, that it is of little value. I settled on the Screen Blanker display that displays the estimated time to completion and the percent done.

SpinRite costs $89, less for updates, and is downloadable from the Gibson Research web site. The program is only about 90 KB in size (it is written in assembly language), so you are paying about $1/KB—probably the most expensive program I have bought when figured on a per KB basis. Technical help is free, and an 800 number is provided.

The license is for use on only one computer. To test the program for this article I had to disregard that, since I wanted to see how it ran on various machines. My first choice was another laptop on which the hard drive had definite problems and indicated as much by a message to that effect and a requirement that Scandisk be run. Unfortunately, Scandisk would start then eventually freeze (probably when it got to the problem area). Sadly SpinRite also stopped responding during its initial disk integrity test. A call to the tech line got the response that "if Scandisk wouldn’t run, neither would SpinRite". That, however, is not what you are led to believe at the web site, where it says, "If MS-DOS is aware of the existence of a drive, then SpinRite will run on it." I could do a DOS directory and , in fact, used a ZIP drive in DOS to transfer files to the Zip drive, so DOS was aware of the drive.

My next attempt to use SpinRite was on an old 486 laptop with a compressed drive, which I use for testing purposes. SpinRite is supposed to work on such compressed drives (it says it works with Microsoft‘s Double Space), and I made the boot floppy on that machine so that it included drvspace.bin (Is this the same as Double Space? I don‘t know; it has been too long since I dealt with such things.) I even created a config.sys file containing a device line about drvspace.sys and included it on the floppy. Indeed, SpinRite started up, did a little something to begin its initial drive analysis, gave a message to wait a moment—and never did any more. I tried the suggestion to add the command line option "nocachetest" to no avail. I suspect the compressed drive was the problem. Anyway, I then moved on to the machine I used for this review.

Frederick O’Keefe reviewed SpinRite 4.0 in the August 1997 newsletter. That review was more extensive than what I have done here. And most of what is mentioned there is still applicable to version 5.0. He obviously had used the product much more than I and had a better understanding of its technical aspects. If you find the topic of interest, you would benefit from reading that article at http://www.tpcug.org/reviews/SpinRite.html.

The Gibson Research site is http://www.grc.com/ and offers much information about the product. u