SpinRite 6.1 Review: Still the Best Data Recovery Tool?

Hahahha the thumbnail is awesome!

I was first introduced to SpinRite in the mid 80's. It was when the 10 and 20 mb hard drives was using the MFM encoding architecture.
We were using IBM compatible PC's. We were also using Compaq 3.1 DOS as the operating system.
The problem started happening when we would get read and write errors. I heard that Spinrite would do a non-destructive low level format of the hard drive. Our computer in our office had a large database. The hard drive was a whopping 10mb. I booted Spinrite up from a 360kb floppy disk. This was done after we shut down the office on Friday. I went back to the office on Saturday morning and Spinrite was about 1/3 through the hard drive. The program kept running all Saturday and Saturday night. I came back to the office on Sunday and Spinrite was finished. I took the floppy drive out and rebooted the computer. It was like a new computer. No more read/write errors.
I told a senior engineer friend of mine that worked for Jacobsen Engineering about how good Spinrite was. He said that was impossible to do a non-destructive low level format. He ordered a copy and ran it on several computers at his engineering firm. He reported back telling me it was a miracle on how Spinrite would move the tracks under the read/write heads so there wasn't any read/write errors.

SpinRite should not be an insurance policy. A good backup should be!! Shouldn't be trying to recover bad drives.

From '89-'91 I worked at a computer store. I built and repaired PCs. Other than the obvious hand tools, I had:
– QA+ w/ loopback plugs
– SpinRite
– kickstart card
QA+ was for burn-in and hardware diagnostics.
SpinRite was used for determining optimal interleave, changing the interleave both on drives with and without data, testing drives and recovering data.
The kickstart card was for checking slot voltage and BIOS codes.

I've used SpinRite to ressurect many a disk long enough to get the file off them going back to my first used Compaq luggable with a hacked in 20MB hard drive.

-If your backups are laying around in a cabinet, with spinrite you can refresh de sectors of the hard disk(yes also ssd needs refreshing).(or you can copy to another hard disk).
-You can use spirite also if you damage(the sectors) the beginning of a hard disk, because a hard disk will not boot or be usable if the starting sectors a damaged, I used this 2 times and it worked with this problem.

Spinrite is not for data recovery but for sector “repair” to allow for software level recovery. I have used this to “fix” bad sectors to perform a successful clone followed by error correction via scan tools but it’s not a perfect method and not a reliable method. I have had success having spin rite fix drives with hundreds of bad sectors to be used as spare drives but sometimes these take days to perform and not guaranteed – I had a hard drive take weeks to “fix” a sector but would not get passed and wasn’t worth running but I had spin rite take few days successfully reviving a drive that failed SMART but then passes SMART tests. So yeah, it’s a great tool to have but i would not use it solely for data recovery.

I purchased Spinrite over 10 years ago. Works very well. Got my no charge upgrade a few days ago. It performs recovery when others can not. Also, I purchased a couple shirts from Learn Linux. Glad you reviewed this product!!

What CP/M utilities do you recommend?

Not needed anymore.
Perhaps data recovery?

But I have it and only used it once, maybe twice, with old IDE disks with weak sectors.

Never needed it since SATA drives or SSDs, as once those fail, NO software can fix or get 100% of the data.

Can it fix bad sectors or smart errors!?

I purchased SpinRite many years ago and I primarily use it to validate a drive before putting it into use in a production environment. I purchased a ZimaBoard 232 (currently $89.00). It is a fan-less x86 computer to minimize the footprint of my SpinRite hardware testing environment. I highly recommend both products.

Previously, I used Victoria to check the health of my hard drives. It can also scan the drive and remap bad sectors. Unfortunately, it only works on Windows (there were versions for DOS before, but they have poor compatibility with modern hardware), so you have to use bootable Windows PE images.
But then I came to the conclusion that this is not enough and it is better to rewrite the disk multiple times to understand whether it really works fine. So now I do the following:
1. Get and save SMART information
2. Scan the disk via badblocks -svw /dev/sdX
3. Get SMART information again and compare
This will either rewrite the damaged data (fix the so-called soft bads), or force the disk to remap the sector, or you will see that your disk is in dying and needs to be replaced.

The downside is that you will lose all data this way (there is a read-only mode, but, as with Victoria, I do not consider it a sufficient test). On the other hand, this is a great way to erase all data if you want to sell the drive.
The behavior of SpinRite is more similar to another program I heared about – HDD regenerator, which is often described as a tool for repairing hard drives, although in fact everything comes down to what is described above – either just rewriting damaged data on a hardware-undamaged sector, or remapping it.
I wouldn't consider this a serious data recovery tool. If you just need to restore the file system to working order and restore the operating system boot, the standard tools for a specific FS or OS are more suitable here.
But if you have serious problems at the hardware level, it is much safer to make an image of the damaged disk and then recover data from it using R-Studio or something like that.
By the way, if you use ZFS, it supports such a thing as scrub, that is, the system periodically checks the data for readability and restores it if possible (perhaps some other FS also support this).
As for increasing the speed of SSD (the functionality declared by the author), I also think that this can be achieved by simpler and cheaper (I mean free) means. But I have not studied this issue, because I have never even encountered such a problem.
I respect the author of this program, I use his other utilities and can recommend them. But I don't find this program particularly useful. There may be some rare cases when SpinRite can help, but it is difficult for me to imagine such a situation.

Been using SpinRite since heck was a pup. This video reinvigorates me to go do some maintenance on a couple of my old work horses….and figure out how to get the newest version since I bought a version forever ago.

Agreed! You should do a fall video where you show the performance boost on running spin right on ssds

Thanks. I remember using SpinRite years ago.

Is this what software recovery businesses use when they charge hundreds of dollars to recover corrupted hard drive data?

Thanks Jay. I've listened to Steve for years and still wasn't exactly sure what SpinRite did and at this point I was too afraid to ask.

I used this in the old DOS days. It was a great tool. I will have to check out the new version.

Steve Gibson, SpinRite's "Dad" here… Wow, Jay. Thank you for helping spread the word. I'm hoping to at least get the news of the no-charge upgrade to v6.1 out to SpinRite 6's 20 years of past purchasers (v6.0 was released in 2004). So what you've taken the time to do really helps. And I thought your comments and review were perfectly balanced. Thanks again!

Any real IT pro knows this software is bs trash. Your credibility is hit recommending this junk.

I got this long time ago back in the XP era. Didn't help me at all back then still lost data. What's funny after I reformatted the drive it worked fine for another 5 years after that. Though that got me into doing DVD backups regularly now extra drive backups which is always the best way.

Embedded ads AND ads…….. FFS!

Oh man, I would love to hear about this review on the next episode of Security Now! 😃

Spinrite, the best for what it is doing