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Gibson Research's SpinRite 5.0
by By Donald Rosenfield, NOCCC, cardar@home.com - February 22, 2001 at 14:28:56:
Gibson Research’s “SpinRite” is an interesting program. I seem to remember iit from when I had a 486DX33 and carried around a box of programs, so, if a friend needed help, I could pull out SpinRite 3.1 or Norton’s Utilities or any of about eight or nine other programs that could get them up and running. Of course, we don’t use XTs or x86s anymore; we keep up-to-date and our hard drives and removable drives hold much more data and potentially are subject to many more problems.I ran into one of those problems on my 20Gb C: drive recently and found I had to go to SpinRite 5.0’s Level 4 to fix it. The program had to run for 21 hours, even on my 733Mb PIII computer, but at least it didn’t need to do so continuously. I interrupted it several times to go back to Windows and DOS to get some work done around here, each time returning to where SpinRite had left off. Actually, I didn’t last the full 21 hours as I only have 2.5Gb of data on that drive—I have more on my D: and E: drives—and gave up at about 18 hours. Hmm. Can I go back to it now, several days later?
Ahhh! It picked up where I left off. I’ll turn it on before I go to bed and let it do its thing.
But that’s the question, isn’t it? What does it do? What is its thing?”
SpinRite, Alan, is the premier program to revitalize your hard and removable drives (assuming the latter are booted when you turn on your computer) and to retrieve otherwise lost data on those disks. It uses a plethora of tools to massage your disks including:
• A graphic status display that shows the current status of the partition with which you are working and, as it analyzes the information it displays the symbols for that area. If any data can be recovered from a bad sector, you are notified about that action.
• In addition, any bad sectors are so marked so those areas are not used by your computer. Any unrecoverable data is marked so you can restore it from your backups
• A detailed technical log allows you to scroll through all the varied screens while the program is working.
Everybody needs this program because, even if you don’t have problems now with your hard drives, you will in the future, as we all know. We all suffer the slings and arrows of magnetic material deterioration except when using a CD-R or a DVD-R as a hard drive. . SpinRite 5.0 can put off that future by extending the life of your drives by reading and rewriting the data. Supports FAT32, SCSI, Windows, Zip & Jaz! List price of SpinRite 5.0 is $89, available only from Gibson Research Company at www.grc.com or 1-800-736-0367. Owners of versions 3.1 and 4.0 may upgrade to SpinRite 5.0 for $39.
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