Note: I have no doubt that many people will notice that the serial number of my copy of SpinRite v6.1 appears on screen. Leaving it was easier than removing it, and that serial number has been invalidated. So its appearance here is of no consequence. (And thanks for your concern! :)
@@klaatubob The problem with doing something so specific is that no two BIOSes are the same. (It's annoying!) They each get into their configuration screens differently (F2, F10, F12, Del, etc.) and those config screens are all different. GRC has some really terrific web forums at HTTP://FORUMS.GRC.COM and it's filled with very knowledgeable people, many of whom worked with me through the 3.5 years of SpinRite v6.1 development... and there's a LOT of available support for individual machines, etc. You can also search the forums by keyword. :)
@@VideoNOLA Those were the days, weren't they? Crystal radio kits, spy glasses, build muscles and don't get sand kicked in your face....ahhhh yes - dreams. And, waiting 6-8 weeks for delivery then running to the mailbox after school day after day.
Thanks for the walk through and passing on information that I didn’t know. Been using this tool for nearly 20 years and have yet to find anything better.
Indeed, assembly language is the best. I've programmed in 6502, Z80 and best of all, ARM 2. It was so elegent with its fixed size 32-bit instruction and data format.
*Steve, your video and voice is like re-acquainting with an old friend! Long before I had my Dad's hand-me-down PC-AT, read your and John Dvorak's columns in Dad's InfoWorld's. Later we met you at an OC computer show where you graciously autographed slipcase of your "Passion for Technology" set. You taught me the clean elegance of Assembler. Still have Dad's bound book copy of SR 3.1, still use SR 6.1 Love 'ya!*
Oh my!! RUclips just randomly suggested this video! Is there really a new release!? I'm so happy to discover this! SpinRite was one of the greatest things that ever happened to modern computing! I've been sad for years that I couldn't use it on large modern drives. So happy!
As an old system builder, and BBS Sysop, it's good to see Steve still around, and with an important product that hasn't been tampered with annoying, hungry GUI's and bad sales hype.
Mr. Gibson, Thank you so much for all of your efforts in building SpinRite from day one! I am also glad that you have kept the DOS look in your program. It takes me back to the fun and exciting days of PCs. I wish I had saved a copy of thickest Computer Shopper. My son who is starting his career in IT would be shocked by it. Page after page of new tech. As exciting as the ads in the back of Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Comics and so on.... Sorry, I'm getting that old. :-) I wish you and yours all the very best life has to offer, Kevin
Thanks, Mitch. I'm glad I created this video since I recognize that over the past 20 years (!) since SpinRite 6.0 was released, “DOS” and “text mode apps” have become far less familiar. This v6.1 was a major “catch-up” release which I had promised to all SpinRite 6 owners years ago. It was a massive rewrite under the covers. All of the new code is 32-bit assembly language and v6.1 uses “Flat Real Mode” to allow access to multiple 16 megabyte buffers for maximum data transfer performance. So even though it took 4 years to get it done, I'm glad it exists. It can really help today's mass storage. 👍
@@SGgrc Well I've been hearing about it in your SecurityNow podcast from before 6.0 times and each time I tell myself I need to learn more about it. Thanks for making this video. Oh and as someone who's been into computers since 1980 and building my own boxes since the x286 days, I absolutely love the no frills, down to earth interface. Less is more!
Thank you Steve for SpinRite 6.1. I purchased a 6.0 license years ago but was never able to run it (at first on my Intel Mac, later on standard Windows PC) on my 2+ TB drives. SpinRite 6.1 handled them just fine and definitely improved performance on three 4 TB SSDs after running on level 3. Yes it took hours on each drive, but actual transfer rates for data backups over USB increased from around 120 MB/s to upward of 300 MB/s where those drives had originally begun. I also feel more confident in my backed up data for having had every single bit re-written to the drive, ensuring the charge which differentiates one bit from another is refreshed.
Wow... Music to my ears. I worked on SpinRite 6.1 for 3.5 years and the experiences you had and have just reported are EXACTLY what I was hoping SpinRite's longtime users would experience. Thanks for sharing!
I always feel hardcore utility programs like this one are most trust-inspiring with this kind of workhorse 8-color ncurses interface and this sort of very sincere wizard to explain it. The interrupt-resume feature is S-Level, *extremely* thoughtful, and seems like it must save a lot of time for certain kinds of operations. Much admiration, sir. Bravo!!
Steve, Awesome to see you're still around! I saves a lot of data for my customers over the years! Great program! Interesting it works on SSDs! As I remember back in the MFM days, SpinRite would read out a track, lowlevel format it, highlevel format it, and write the data back. How cool is that! Also... did you write "Declasify"? A disk wipe software? We used that at NASA HQ with Lockheed. I think I spoke to you on the phone to arrange a site license. Like 20 years ago! Thanks for the video!!!
I was an PC-DOS developer in the eighties, when we found SpinRite it was the holy grail. I wish I could run it on my Macs. I always had this through my server farm days and Cisco work. THANKS STEVE!!!
Steve, I have been with you since before Security Now started. I would tell you how many times SpinRite saved me but I've heard you read enough letters that I know, you know. Thank you for the most bullet proof continuing value that I have ever purchased.
Wow, this brings back really good memories of futzing with mechanical hard drives, but I certainly don't miss those days. At all! Thanks, Steve, for this golden nugget of goodness that kept me in business for a very long time!!
I am amazed you still program for DOS based interfaces and how the modern drives still could use software such as this. I remember having to learn all about interleving HDD and heads and sectors back on my first PC Amstrad 2086 back in like 1985-89 with a 30Mb HDD. I had to reinstall the OS and was talked through witha technician on the phone when I was like 10-13 years old. Very much thrown in the deep end but gave me a massive insight into a large scope of detail hidden to most users at the time and yet so crucial to an efficient pc.
Today, SpinRite is still a DOS application only because it was originally. You probably know that everything else I've written (while still all in assembly language) have all been Windows apps. And that's SpinRite's future, too. I had promised the world a no-charge upgrade from the original SpinRite 6.0, so this v6.1 is that. But this will definitely be the final SpinRite for DOS! :)
@@SGgrc The SpinRite DOS UI beautiful. Wish we had more professional looking software like this, be it on Windows, DOS or whatever, instead of everything looking and behaving like a phone app. That goes for websites as well.
Thanks for taking the time to do this. I just recently purchased Spinrite for the first time and haven't had a chance to actually use it yet and I went looking for this video last week and really didn't find anything current. This is super helpful, thank you.
An important thing to know when booting SpinRite on a modern computer is that this is a Legacy USB Boot Device. Most computers today (especially laptops) boot in UEFI mode with Legacy Boot Disabled. In order to Boot SpinRite you may need to first enter the BIOS and Enable Legacy Boot. In Dell systems this is a two-step process, i.e. you have to Allow Legacy Mode on one page and then Enable Legacy Boot on another. After running SpinRite you then need to restore those BIOS settings to their original values .
I remember being biased as a kid (I have no idea why) towards Norton utilities vs. Spinrite. Really cool to see this updated, and I know Spinrite saved and help a lot of my friends growing up. The built in RAM test is a really good idea.
Amazing to see an application originally created way-back-when, still be relevant with modern technology... A testament to your genius Steve... I also learned something new about SSD's. I'll be running this release on all my machines, b/c, why not.
Steve, looks like the word on SpinRite is getting out. I just saw a Spinrite video from David Plumber on Dave's Garage. I have been a SpinRite user for over a decade and love it.
Nah, SpinRite has been out. The word GRC is on is RUclips is getting out. I saw Gibson and still doubted it was like the actual GRC. Thanks to Dave for that recommended hit.
A 2024 version of spinrite? I so miss this software! Have not used it since Version 3, I need a new license because all my floppies have gone bad decades ago. i will be purchasing it based on this walkthrough.
Thanks, Ted. SpinRite remains very useful for the maintenance of all mass storage drives. The big surprise that surfaced early in the v6.1 development was for solid state drives. Whereas the end of spinning drives has always been well known to be slower due to them having much shorter tracks, the most-used FRONT of solid state drives becomes much slower due to a phenomenon known as "read disturb". The charges stored in the "bit cells" drift away from their original values. SpinRite makes rewriting them easy, which restore drives to their factory speed. :)
15:49 the log shows 0.0001 lower % than the actual stopping point. Thus ensuring that if you enter the number from the log you won't miss any fractional percent of the drive. I was thinking to myself that this is how it OUGHT to work when it showed the interrupt screen earlier. So impressed to see it actually implemented that way here!
Hi Steve good to see you still supporting this, I used to use it back in the day on st225's when I changed out the controller and mfm to rll. This and norton calibrate were my tools of choice, I'm sad peter sold out to the corporations as his utils were the best until then. Debug g=c800:5 is ingrained in my dna! I guess everyone deserves a payday once in awhile. :)
Agreed. During the work on SpinRite v6.1 I was back in "DOS Land" and I was often using Peter's excellent utilities. "Calibrate" is a bit of a sore spot for me, since they literally stole SpinRite. It wasn't Peter, though - it was a horrible CEO (named Ron Posner) who Peter put in place to run things as the company outgrew him. Peter and I had lunch and Peter had been told to purchase SpinRite outright from me because it was the #1 feature their users of "The Norton Utilites" wanted added. SpinRite was still very new and I'd already been around the block a few times by then. So I knew better than to sell it to them for any price. I said that in a few years I'd be glad to consider some sort of co-marketing arrangement. After lunch, Peter and I went back to their offices in Santa Monica and met with Ron. He assumed that Peter had a deal and Peter had to say that he didn't. We later heard from a Norton programmer that Ron had given a copy of SpinRite to one of their developers and said: "Go home and stay home until we have a clone of this." The final proof that this is what they did was that after Calibrate came out - and EVERYONE who knew SpinRite ASSUMED that I had sold it to them since it looked and acted nearly identical - one of my guys looked inside Calibrate and found byte-for-byte identical code from SpinRite. There were some places where I wanted to see whether the BIOS supported some function. So I was placing some garbage code into the registers before calling the function and then checking them afterward to see whether they had been changed. CALIBRATE was using the =exact= same garbage values... since whoever copied SpinRite didn't know why I had chosen that data and was afraid to change it. And after Calibrate was shipped, WE started receiving technical support calls from Calibrate users asking for help since Norton's support people were unable to support it (since they didn't really create it). We told those Norton customers that we'd be glad to offer them support after they purchased a copy of SpinRite... which we DID write and understand. :) Later, they dropped Calibrate from their offerings because it was causing them too much trouble and they were unable to support it. Again... nothing against Peter. He's always been a good guy. Things just got out of his control.
@@SGgrc The Norton tool I really miss is Speed Disk from Norton Utilities 2000. It was FAST and it would 100% defragment a drive in one pass, including the swap file. Unfortunately it didn't work in NT4, 2000, XP, or newer versions of Windows. Far as I can tell, all the defragmenters for Windows after 9x and Me are essentially alternative frontends for Microsoft's ultra slow defragmenter. Speed Disk would start by making room at the start of the drive then move files there, collecting their parts scattered across the drive. All the NTFS defraggers I've tried are nowhere near as efficient in the way they relocate files, nor do they do a 100% defrag in one pass, even on a non-system drive. It's as though with the end of the DOS based Windows era, everyone doing defragmenting software just gave up.
wow after nearly 20-years of knowing about Spinrite we finally see and hear Steve Gibson talk about it and how to use it. Thanks and interesting to hear you say about the SSD beginning sectors been the slowest. I have couple NVMe's and one is the bootable hdd which I have never tested so be interested to see how this performs one day. Thanks also for the insight on refreshing the drive using spinrite and this improved the hdd performance, learnt something new today :)
wow! I had stopped thinking about SpinRite when I moved to SSD - should have realized you'd be right there to keep my drives in tip-top shape! Thanks for the years of work.
Check out the "before" and "after" benchmarks on the SpinRite "Testimonials" page here: www.grc.com/sr/testimonials.htm The performance improvements are typically stunning. Based upon the experience SpinRite v6.1's users are reporting, we're now recommending an annual pass of SpinRite at Level 3 over SSDs to keep them "fresh" and healthy. :)
Thank you, Steve. I first used SpinRite in 1986 to improve the performance on my 80286 PC. I still use it today. In my opinon, the greatest disk maintenance tool ever created.
I've never even noticed the drive benchmarks part of spinrite! OMG, I've always used "Readspeed" first. haha! well, don't I feel stupid now after owning SR6 for ... well, since it was released! My boss had SR5, and I loved what it could do, so bought 6 when it came out. The upgrade to 6.1's memory page I noticed... skipped past that and just went with my tried and true Level 2 and spacebar/enter combos! hehe, i'm gonna go play with that upgrade again now. Liked and sub'd mate, hope you get more sales from this from the algo, and with Dave Plumber also plugging the benefits of SR.
Spinrite was an amazing program years ago. Along with tools like Disktrix which would sort your HDD by program usage and speed up loading for more used apps. The inner ring of the HDD was faster than outer rings. Sometimes a UI is s sign of good engineering under the hood. Ot just works with no extras.
@@saganandroid4175 I thought the inside ring was faster, but you are probably right. Either way, it would move the programs you use more there and it would make a big difference when loading from HDD.
NO, the outer rings were faster than the inner rings because hard drives always spin at the same RPM. Before SSDs were a thing this fact was exploited by only formatting say 10% to 20% of a drive since drives were formatted from perimeter inwards. So this put all the data on the fastest part.
Thanks Mike. I'm glad you still had the same email address! I sent out around 160,000 pieces of mail and, not surprisingly, many bounced! (Especially all those old CompuServe accounts! )
At 3:31, you say the Level 3 should be used once per year on an SSD for maintenance - yet the screen says Level 3 is NOT recommended for SSDs. Could you please clarify?
When you look at the amount of writing that an SSD can sustain -- typically many thousands of times its own size -- a single rewrite of its own size is a very small cost in return for the benefit. I was probably overly and needlessly cautious about that scary pop-up in SpinRite v6.1, but I didn't want SpinRite users to be running and rerunning SpinRite over SSDs needlessly. I think that once a year is VERY conservative and that it ought to also be sufficient.
@@SGgrc very helpful, thanks. SpinRight, back in the “spinning” days, has saved more times than I can count. Good to know that a Once Per Year SpinRight still makes sense. Great program!
@@SGgrc Thank you for keeping up the good work of promoting maintenance over replacement. Do the refreshing writes in Level 3 get reflected in the TBW numbers reported in CrystalDisk and other diagnostics? According to my limited understanding, the physics of NAND gates puts a limit on the number of times they can be written to regardless of the reason. From what you've said, Level 2 should do more limited writing (none if no problems are detected). Thanks also for that.
A great product. I've used 6.1 for a long time now (went through 4.x and 5.x)...thanks Steve! Your talks on security were also interesting - you may want to mention those...
Yep. And even though it's "only" a "point release" (v6.1) it took 3.5 years of work and it's entirely reworked underneath. It uses "Flat Real Mode" (which the early PC gamers used) to get access to all of the machine's memory (even though it's in DOS) so v6.1 is able to use 16 megabyte buffers (it has three) and much more in order to run drives as fast as they can possibly go. And its entirely new levels perform way more work in way less time. So I'm very pleased with what it has become. It's going to take me a while to get SpinRite moved over into Windows, which is where it's headed next. But as I was writing all of v6.1's new 32-bit code I knew that's where it was heading. So we'll have this new v6.1 for DOS until then. 👍
I used Spinrite 6.0 last week to fix a drive on an old Windows Vista PC before giving it to my grandchildren to mess around with. Now I'm going to upgrade to 6.1. Thanks Steve.
This is great to see. i was an early user of spinrite and this was my must have software. I'm so glad to see it's still being used today. I wonder if my old versions will still be of any use today.
Hi Steve. Thanks for this. I bought SpinRite at the 6.0 version, and I'm looking forward to grabbing the new version. I've got a couple of systems I'd like to run it on as a test. Thanks for the video.
Upgrading from 6.0 is easy. The first item under the "SpinRite" menu is "Upgrade to v6.1". Just drop your current SpinRite serial number into the form there and you'll receive download links for v6.1. :)
I've been busy. I've been doing a weekly podcast (Security Now!) With Leo Laporte for the past 20 years. And checkout all of the useful freeware I've written for Windows (all in assembly language, of course): www.grc.com/freepopular.htm I spent (wasted) 7 years of my life solving the username & password login problem with SQRL (the FIDO2 Passkeys system is what won). And then the most recent 4 years completely rewriting the "guts" of SpinRite 6.0. It looks nearly the same from the outside... But it's an entirely new beast under the covers. Next up is a big update to our most popular Freeware, the DND Benchmark: www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm then a brand new super-fast super-secure data wiping utility, to be followed up by SpinRite 7. So, as they say... Never a dull moment! 👍🏻
I made that promise about 10 years ago on the Security Now! podcast and I'm certain that some of our listeners purchased SpinRite 6.0 on the basis that they would someday get v6.1 as a free upgrade. As the old saying goes “a promise is a promise.” Although it took 4 years of my life and I ended up completely rewriting SpinRite's "guts" to use 32-bit Flat Real Mode with multiple 16 megabyte buffers for absolute maximum performance, I have no regrets. And it's not clear when we would have stumbled over “The Great SSD Slowdown” and using SpinRite to fix that if I hadn't done v6.1. 👍🏻
I recently purchased the latest spinrite for use on some older Microsoft surface laptops but found that EUFI makes spinrite unusable. I didn’t ask for a refund as I’m an avid fan of security now podcast and keen to support its ongoing development towards a version that will work on modern pcs and laptops. Steve perhaps you could cover why this doesn’t work for me in an upcoming episode as I was hoping to resurrect a slow surface go for my kids and sadly cannot. Hoping spinrite 7 will solve this issue. Cheers and thanks from Melbourne Australia, Rick
Level 2 only performs rewriting of specific locations in the event of the complete unreadability of that region. That's the fastest Level for data recovery since it cruises along only reading until it hits a problem. But the phenomenon everyone is observing with SSDs is that they can slow down incredibly while still eventually being able to recover their own data. So Level 2 may slow down at those locations but it won't rewrite. Level 3 is what you need to use for SSDs. It rewrites everything once, regardless of how long the drive took to read the data. And the beauty of this is that the NEXT time the drive attempts to read that freshly rewritten data it can do so at full original "factory" speed. :) SpinRite will caution its user when they choose any level above 2, since writing to NAND memory is know to ever-so-slightly fatigue the NAND cells. But SSDs can be entirely rewritten tens of thousands of time before anything actually wears out. And we're only doing it once. So SpinRite's caution is probably unnecessary... but I wanted to be responsible. An annual once-per-year whole drive (Level 3) rewrite should be ample to keep drives (that don't spin) running fast and reliably. 👍🏻
@@SGgrc Steve, if it's technically feasible, I think adding the functionality for SpinRite to scan/check multiple drives simultaneously would be extremely useful.
@@odkdsjf DEFINITELY! ALL future SpinRites will be fully multi-tasking and able to have multiple things going on at once. This wasn't feasible for v6.1 due to UI limitations. It would have required a significant reworking. As is was, I rewrote all of SpinRite's core logic over the course of 4 years... And all of THAT will be portable into Windows... Where a new UI will be designed specifically to allow SpinRite to become a mass storage maintenance and recovery workstation. 👍
@@SGgrc That version sounds amazing, I am looking forward to it. Hopefully future SpinRite versions will retain the capability to be executable from a Linux distro or live DOS-based bootable USB flash drive. That is useful for situations where Windows breaks, a dedicated Linux/non-OS repair workstation is used. Thank you, again. Regards
Actually, SpinRite 6.0 was released in 2004 (20 years ago) and SpinRite 5 several years before that. And each of these major moves forward removed some of the oldest features that were really no longer needed and were taking up space. BUT... =all= owners of SpinRite 6.1 also have licenses to SpinRite 6.0 and 5.0 ... so SpinRite 5.0 will definitely work on those older drives without any trouble!
9.8406% on screen dialog but 9.8405% in the log. Was this difference because each referred to different sectors? Perhaps ...05 was the last sector fully scanned and ...06 the next? Thanks Steve for your excellent software and technical commentary in Security Now.
further down in the detailed log, it shows a rounded 9.841 value. it would be nice to be consistent. Although, I would much prefer to be able to enter sectors instead of fractions of percentages.
How does SpinRite relocate data safely on a fully-encrypted drive? I recall Steve mentioning that SP doesn't need to know about the File System used, but wouldn't moving bits around break the encrypted data?
All modern drives are able to remove troubled sectors from their addressable space. This is done in different ways depending upon the drive's technology. “Spinners” are able to “shift all of a drive's sectors downward” into a deliberately left empty "spares" area at the end of the region. This allows a bad sector to be "skipped over." The point, though, is that from the outside, nothing appears to have changed. There's no “visible” sector marked “bad” anymore. Drives are able to hide defective sectors so that they always appear to be 100% defect-free. And as a result of all this - as a result of the total transparency of defective sectors - SpinRite is able to show drives when their sectors are in trouble and thus induce drives to “spare out” these problems... and nothing needs to be changed within the file system, whether it's encrypted or not. 👍
@@SGgrc you've fixed the issue where newer drives couldn't be made to hot swap sectors that formatting marked as bad? I used Spinrite on some drives where the only way to make them use spare sectors was to give them a fresh format without scanning for errors. Then when Spinrite came to an iffy sector it could either restore it or force a reallocation.
Right. Actually, it's not that it "still works" on SSD, though. I just spent 4 years of my life completely rewriting SpinRite. I left the user interface (mostly) alone, since it was fine. But nearly ALL of the "guts" of the program were rewritten in 32-bit assembly code. It's now a screaming demon, and it can do wonders for today's SSD storage! :) Just check out the recent testimonials: www.grc.com/sr/testimonials.htm
SpinRite's new built-in RAM memory test is just a simple random pattern write then read-back. SpinRite had a development testing community of around 600 users so several of them had machines with RAM problems. We compared SpinRite's test with the classic MemTest86 and they both found errors at the same rate. So SpinRite just writes random patterns and rereads them to verify. 👍
Have used SpinRite since the early 80's after talking with the head of support at Compaq. He stated that they used SpinRite to test hard drives before they where installed in Compaq devices. The bad ones were weed out and sent back to the manufacturer so they did not become a support issue at the very start for Compaq. Just wish I could use my new SpinRite 6.1 version with my Apple M1 MacBook Air. Steve talked the other day about a solution that it looks like I am going to use. Create new macOS/UNIX USB install with latest version. FULL backup using Time Machine to two separate storage drives. First is the one I am already using. Second is a external SSD which I have tested with SpinRite 6.1 on level 3. Then after this is done I am going to do a fresh "Nuke and repave, or flatten as Microsoft likes to call it" install of macOS/UNIX and then full restore from the Time Machine backup.
Steve, just wanted some clarification. You mentioned it is a good idea to run level 3 once a year for maintenance but on the blue screen it says that level three is NOT recommended for SSD drives. Used caps because that is how it was written in the description.
13:02 you talk about moving to Level 3 to work on an SSD. Yet at 3:04 the screen clearly states that Level 3 "is NOT recommended for SSDs...". Can you explain why the contradiction?
Not sure how long, new PCs will include legacy BIOS mode. Will Spinrite be UEFI compatible some day? I know (Free)dos isn't, so not sure how that would be achieved. Would more or less, require it to be its own OS? Or use BSD/Linux instead?
You're 100% right. As I noted in my reply to your other question, I purchased the source code for a proprietary embedded OS known as RTOS-32. So all future SpinRites will be Windows apps that can run either under Windows or on their own OS that can boot on either BIOS or UEFI. 👍
Yes. Several years ago I purchased an embedded real-time OS called RTOS-32. (www.on-time.com/rtos-32.htm) SpinRite v7 will be a Windows app... but this RTOS-32 has a Win32 clone API, so SpinRite 7 for Windows will also run on this RTOS-32, which will essentially be SpinRite's own natively booting OS, and it will boot on either BIOS or UEFI firmware. 👍
I wish. But, no. Once we get over to SpinRite 7 for Windows then SpinRite will be able to take advantage of Windows drivers. But there are no such drivers that I'm aware of for DOS, and the SAS controller hardware is neither IDE, ATA nor AHCI compatible... all which v6.1 DOES have its own high performance drivers for.
Does any program like this exist for the Commodore 64? I have floppy disks that are over 30 years old and would really love to test their reliability as well as refresh their data with such an easy to use program.
The Commodore 64 drives were amazing for their time. As with the Atari drives, as I recall the drives themselves were quite intelligent and took high-level commands, like "Format" and then did all the work themselves. But that means there was no low-level access of the sort that you're looking for.
I had to spin right license years and years ago. It's been a long time since I've seen that disc. My PCs I don't think we're really powerful enough to run it well. I remember trying to run it on what was a large drive for its time - maybe 500 GB - and giving up after it been running for several days without completing. I saw the new version mentionioned in a Dave's Garage video and thought I'd check out this walkthrough.
Yes. 100%. SpinRite is “encryption agnostic” because it's operating below the file system level, directly upon the drive's physical media. So it will run equally well on an entirely empty drive, on a drive filled with “white noise”, or anything in between. 👍
Yes! 100% assembly language (and still quite small.) The code now requires a 32-bit processor with protected mode support since SpinRite v6.1 uses "flat real mode" to access 16 megabyte data transfer buffers. But all owners of v6.1 also have licenses for v6.0 and v5.0 ... this is so that really really old systems are still usable. 👍
YES!! And THAT was the biggest surprise of all. Near the beginning of this work we discovered that regions of SSD that are only ever read and never written -- like much of the file system and the operation system once they're installed - tend to slow down over time due to something known as "Read Disturb". (Search for the phrase "Read Disturb" on the 'Net and you'll see what a HUGE problem this is for modern SSDs which are cramming so much data into so small a place.) By rewriting these regions, SpinRite is able to restore a drive's original factory performance. I've placed some customer before and after performance photos on SpinRite testimonials page here: www.grc.com/sr/testimonials.htm so you can see for yourself!
"Daves Garage" RUclips channel featured Spinrite in his video. He is a retired Microsoft engineer who did most his work in assembly back in his day working on Windows. It was a great review/explanation of Spinrite. He also rebuilds full size PDP-11's! In his garage.
Fascinating! I ran SpinRite on my 74 GB 10,000 RPM VelociRaptor drive back in 2005 and it gave me weird error messages. I never had issues with the drive so I didn't trust the utility at the time. Who knows what actually caused the errors. I had no idea it is still being maintained and it does sound great for SSDs.
Back when I used to listen to the Twit podcasts, I thought there was discussion of making a Mac version, but another project (Squirrel) had to be completed first. I'm guessing that a Mac version is never coming?
Yes! Perfectly. Since SpinRite operates at the "physical" level of drives - below their file systems - it is completely "file system agnostic". It will run on empty drives, on drives with foreign file systems, on drives filled with white noise, on encrypted drives, and anything in between. 👍
Steve, you’re a geek and an old school white hat hacker. It shows in your products, your presentation style, and the fact that you’re doing everything from DOS where there is no real OS overhead or interference from the OS. The computer world has tried to move beyond guys like you and I, but it wouldn’t really be able to function well without guys like us.
Hah! Thanks for your note, Geoff. And, yeah... guilty as charged. I sometimes explain that I was a nerd long before that became "fashionable". And you're right about the benefits of DOS. There IS no "OS" there... mostly just a program loader and some file system and console APIs. My plans for the future are to first move SpinRite to Windows since I CAN still get good low-level access through USB and I've seen with the release of v6.1 that everyone wants to use USB to connect drives. I also purchased the source code for a real-time OS (RTOS-32) that was at end-of-life because no one was buying upgrades because it had no bugs. (My kind of software!) AND it's a Win32 API emulator... so that will allow me to have "Pro" versions that are bootable and Windows releases that run under Windows. :) And, as you said... "old school geek". But I LOVE computers! 👍
@ I’m a decade younger than you, started on the Commodore Pet in 1979/1980, and Apple II in 1980. I still remember the Gibson Light Pen (I didn’t have one, but a friend did). I’ve written in a dozen or so programming languages, but my favorites are still BASIC (modern compiled versions), and ASM. I’ve written ASM for half a dozen processors. Details vary, but it’s all pretty much the same.
Great question. I should have mentioned that. SpinRite is 100% compatible with any and all file systems, and even encrypted drives, since it operates down at the physical sector level and doesn't concern itself at all with what's in the drive's sectors. Since all IDE and later drives are able to handle defective sector relocation at the hardware level, SpinRite works with the drive to "show it" there's a problem, after which the drive will take a bad sector (or 4K block of sectors) and will replace it/them with a good new spare. So, SpinRite will run on anything. 👍
It's true that SpinRite needed to completely change to keep up with the times. It has completely abandoned all notion of cylinders, heads and sectors (CHS) addressing in favor of seeing all mass storage media as an unbroken linear region of storage. But the BIG surprise was the discovery of the degree to which today's solid state drive media was slowing down WITHOUT generating errors. SSD controllers will struggle mightily to read their data. And they can almost always succeed. But they should NOT have to work so hard. We found that this was due to a phenomenon known as "Read Disturb" and that it could be completely resolved by simply rewriting that data once. So that meant that SpinRite was no longer only useful for spinning drives!
Thank you, Steve, for this great tool! Is it possible to mark one drive for level 2 run, and then a mechanical drive for level 3 run, all in one shot? :)
As you suspect, SpinRite doesn’t have “per drive” levels… but it has extensive command line automation. So it would be very easy to have SpinRite run at different levels on different drives.
"Kiitos paljon kommentistasi. Olet oikeassa, että vuosikymmenten aikana SpinRiteä on pidetty ajan tasalla kehittämällä sitä eteenpäin. Ja paljon enemmän on vielä tulossa!" (with thanks to ChatGPT for the Finnish translations!)
I know this asking a lot, but you are one of the world's premiere assembly language programmers - it would be so cool if you could rewrite the critical calculation/evaluation modules of the open source StockFish chess engine, into your super-fast assembly code, thereby making it the most formidable in the world! - Thank you so much!!
THAT would be such a kick-ass fun thing to do... but I have so much still that I NEED to get done. I'm going to be hugely improving GRC's DNS Benchmark, then a new product to do the reverse of SpinRite - super-fast super-secure drive data wiping - then SpinRite really needs to move to Windows. So... yeah... if I only had the time!
Yes - Quite well, in fact. But you should use SpinRite v5.0 for that. It contains the best diskette recovery/restoration of all. Any SpinRite 6.x owner is entitled to both v6.0 and v5.0. When you obtain your software download link (which anyone can get at any time) you copy and paste it into the browser URL instead of clicking on it. Then simply change the filename at the end from “spinrite.exe” to “sr5.exe” and you'll receive a licensed copy of SpinRite 5. SpinRite v6.1 has a MUCH superior USB formatting and setup. So you should use your v6.1 to prepare a bootable USB. Then just copy SpinRite v5.0 to it. After booting, SpinRite 6.1 will auto-start. So hit ESC to back out of 6.1 to DOS, then start v5.0 by entering "sr5" and pressing Enter. 👍🏻
Wow, I bought a copy of this back in the '90s and it's still as awesome today as it was back then!
Note: I have no doubt that many people will notice that the serial number of my copy of SpinRite v6.1 appears on screen. Leaving it was easier than removing it, and that serial number has been invalidated. So its appearance here is of no consequence. (And thanks for your concern! :)
Steve, could you do a similar video walking through how to create a bootable CDROM and change the bios to boot from it?
@@klaatubob The problem with doing something so specific is that no two BIOSes are the same. (It's annoying!) They each get into their configuration screens differently (F2, F10, F12, Del, etc.) and those config screens are all different. GRC has some really terrific web forums at HTTP://FORUMS.GRC.COM and it's filled with very knowledgeable people, many of whom worked with me through the 3.5 years of SpinRite v6.1 development... and there's a LOT of available support for individual machines, etc. You can also search the forums by keyword. :)
It's like when you see an advertisement from a 50-year old comic book or TV ad and wonder, "Do you think they still answer that phone number?"
@@VideoNOLA Those were the days, weren't they? Crystal radio kits, spy glasses, build muscles and don't get sand kicked in your face....ahhhh yes - dreams. And, waiting 6-8 weeks for delivery then running to the mailbox after school day after day.
@@SGgrc you recommend Level 3 for SSDs yet on the Screen it States Specifically not for SSDs, can we get a clarification on this?
Thanks for the walk through and passing on information that I didn’t know. Been using this tool for nearly 20 years and have yet to find anything better.
I’ve been a SpinRite user for many years. Thank you Steve for such a wonderful application.
Thanks. SpinRite's value for solid state drives came as a surprise. So I won't be stopping with SpinRite v6.1.
@@SGgrc You saved my TIVO. Then I bought copies for our grad students. You saved one of them from having to redo years of research!
Wow, I'm an old IT guy from the 90's, and I can't believe that SpinRite is still around.
Well... I'm also an old IT guy from the 90's (hence DOS and assembly code! :) ... and the darn thing just keeps being useful! Thanks for your note!
I'm an old IT guy from the 60's, and I can't believe that I am still around.
@KameraShy 😅
To be fair 6.1 is very old so not being updated just still works great.
@@KameraShy neither can we! :)
Thanks for all the great, tiny utilities all these years, Steve. Big fan. Assembly Language is a lost art.
Indeed, assembly language is the best. I've programmed in 6502, Z80 and best of all, ARM 2. It was so elegent with its fixed size 32-bit instruction and data format.
*Steve, your video and voice is like re-acquainting with an old friend! Long before I had my Dad's hand-me-down PC-AT, read your and John Dvorak's columns in Dad's InfoWorld's. Later we met you at an OC computer show where you graciously autographed slipcase of your "Passion for Technology" set. You taught me the clean elegance of Assembler. Still have Dad's bound book copy of SR 3.1, still use SR 6.1 Love 'ya!*
Oh my!! RUclips just randomly suggested this video!
Is there really a new release!?
I'm so happy to discover this!
SpinRite was one of the greatest things that ever happened to modern computing! I've been sad for years that I couldn't use it on large modern drives.
So happy!
Wow, what a blast from the past. Thanks man, your software saved me a couple times. I treat spinning rust very carefully now.
As an old system builder, and BBS Sysop, it's good to see Steve still around, and with an important product that hasn't been tampered with annoying, hungry GUI's and bad sales hype.
Mr. Gibson, Thank you so much for all of your efforts in building SpinRite from day one! I am also glad that you have kept the DOS look in your program. It takes me back to the fun and exciting days of PCs. I wish I had saved a copy of thickest Computer Shopper. My son who is starting his career in IT would be shocked by it. Page after page of new tech. As exciting as the ads in the back of Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Comics and so on.... Sorry, I'm getting that old. :-)
I wish you and yours all the very best life has to offer, Kevin
Thanks Steve. This was very useful. I'm definitely going to get a copy of SpinRite after seeing this.
Thanks, Mitch. I'm glad I created this video since I recognize that over the past 20 years (!) since SpinRite 6.0 was released, “DOS” and “text mode apps” have become far less familiar. This v6.1 was a major “catch-up” release which I had promised to all SpinRite 6 owners years ago. It was a massive rewrite under the covers. All of the new code is 32-bit assembly language and v6.1 uses “Flat Real Mode” to allow access to multiple 16 megabyte buffers for maximum data transfer performance. So even though it took 4 years to get it done, I'm glad it exists. It can really help today's mass storage. 👍
@@SGgrc Well I've been hearing about it in your SecurityNow podcast from before 6.0 times and each time I tell myself I need to learn more about it.
Thanks for making this video.
Oh and as someone who's been into computers since 1980 and building my own boxes since the x286 days, I absolutely love the no frills, down to earth interface. Less is more!
Thank you Steve for SpinRite 6.1. I purchased a 6.0 license years ago but was never able to run it (at first on my Intel Mac, later on standard Windows PC) on my 2+ TB drives. SpinRite 6.1 handled them just fine and definitely improved performance on three 4 TB SSDs after running on level 3. Yes it took hours on each drive, but actual transfer rates for data backups over USB increased from around 120 MB/s to upward of 300 MB/s where those drives had originally begun. I also feel more confident in my backed up data for having had every single bit re-written to the drive, ensuring the charge which differentiates one bit from another is refreshed.
Wow... Music to my ears. I worked on SpinRite 6.1 for 3.5 years and the experiences you had and have just reported are EXACTLY what I was hoping SpinRite's longtime users would experience. Thanks for sharing!
I always feel hardcore utility programs like this one are most trust-inspiring with this kind of workhorse 8-color ncurses interface and this sort of very sincere wizard to explain it. The interrupt-resume feature is S-Level, *extremely* thoughtful, and seems like it must save a lot of time for certain kinds of operations. Much admiration, sir. Bravo!!
sme here, its uses all the resources for task in hand, not flashy graphics?
Steve, Awesome to see you're still around! I saves a lot of data for my customers over the years! Great program! Interesting it works on SSDs!
As I remember back in the MFM days, SpinRite would read out a track, lowlevel format it, highlevel format it, and write the data back. How cool is that!
Also... did you write "Declasify"? A disk wipe software? We used that at NASA HQ with Lockheed. I think I spoke to you on the phone to arrange a site license. Like 20 years ago!
Thanks for the video!!!
I was an PC-DOS developer in the eighties, when we found SpinRite it was the holy grail. I wish I could run it on my Macs. I always had this through my server farm days and Cisco work. THANKS STEVE!!!
Steve, I have been with you since before Security Now started. I would tell you how many times SpinRite saved me but I've heard you read enough letters that I know, you know. Thank you for the most bullet proof continuing value that I have ever purchased.
Wow, this brings back really good memories of futzing with mechanical hard drives, but I certainly don't miss those days. At all! Thanks, Steve, for this golden nugget of goodness that kept me in business for a very long time!!
I am amazed you still program for DOS based interfaces and how the modern drives still could use software such as this.
I remember having to learn all about interleving HDD and heads and sectors back on my first PC Amstrad 2086 back in like 1985-89 with a 30Mb HDD.
I had to reinstall the OS and was talked through witha technician on the phone when I was like 10-13 years old.
Very much thrown in the deep end but gave me a massive insight into a large scope of detail hidden to most users at the time and yet so crucial to an efficient pc.
Today, SpinRite is still a DOS application only because it was originally. You probably know that everything else I've written (while still all in assembly language) have all been Windows apps. And that's SpinRite's future, too. I had promised the world a no-charge upgrade from the original SpinRite 6.0, so this v6.1 is that. But this will definitely be the final SpinRite for DOS! :)
@@SGgrc The SpinRite DOS UI beautiful. Wish we had more professional looking software like this, be it on Windows, DOS or whatever, instead of everything looking and behaving like a phone app. That goes for websites as well.
Thanks for taking the time to do this. I just recently purchased Spinrite for the first time and haven't had a chance to actually use it yet and I went looking for this video last week and really didn't find anything current. This is super helpful, thank you.
I am a big fan Steve. It's great to see you not only breathing new life into drives but also your awesome product!
An important thing to know when booting SpinRite on a modern computer is that this is a Legacy USB Boot Device. Most computers today (especially laptops) boot in UEFI mode with Legacy Boot Disabled. In order to Boot SpinRite you may need to first enter the BIOS and Enable Legacy Boot. In Dell systems this is a two-step process, i.e. you have to Allow Legacy Mode on one page and then Enable Legacy Boot on another.
After running SpinRite you then need to restore those BIOS settings to their original values
.
I remember being biased as a kid (I have no idea why) towards Norton utilities vs. Spinrite. Really cool to see this updated, and I know Spinrite saved and help a lot of my friends growing up. The built in RAM test is a really good idea.
Before Peter Norton sold his company Norton was a very powerful set of utilities, then along comes Steve Gibson and the rest is history.
Amazing to see an application originally created way-back-when, still be relevant with modern technology... A testament to your genius Steve... I also learned something new about SSD's. I'll be running this release on all my machines, b/c, why not.
Steve, looks like the word on SpinRite is getting out. I just saw a Spinrite video from David Plumber on Dave's Garage. I have been a SpinRite user for over a decade and love it.
Dave's another old-school wizard. I love watching his channel, too
Nah, SpinRite has been out. The word GRC is on is RUclips is getting out.
I saw Gibson and still doubted it was like the actual GRC. Thanks to Dave for that recommended hit.
Yep: I came here from Dave's channel too, not having heard of you or your program before.
Awesome demo, Mr. Gibson, thank you very much.
awesome steve. very detailed overview of spinrite. Thanks for all you do.
Great to see that this invaluable tool still has a place.
A 2024 version of spinrite? I so miss this software! Have not used it since Version 3, I need a new license because all my floppies have gone bad decades ago. i will be purchasing it based on this walkthrough.
Thanks, Ted. SpinRite remains very useful for the maintenance of all mass storage drives. The big surprise that surfaced early in the v6.1 development was for solid state drives. Whereas the end of spinning drives has always been well known to be slower due to them having much shorter tracks, the most-used FRONT of solid state drives becomes much slower due to a phenomenon known as "read disturb". The charges stored in the "bit cells" drift away from their original values. SpinRite makes rewriting them easy, which restore drives to their factory speed. :)
15:49 the log shows 0.0001 lower % than the actual stopping point. Thus ensuring that if you enter the number from the log you won't miss any fractional percent of the drive. I was thinking to myself that this is how it OUGHT to work when it showed the interrupt screen earlier. So impressed to see it actually implemented that way here!
I’ve been waiting for a video like this forever. Thank you so much!
Hi Steve good to see you still supporting this, I used to use it back in the day on st225's when I changed out the controller and mfm to rll.
This and norton calibrate were my tools of choice, I'm sad peter sold out to the corporations as his utils were the best until then.
Debug g=c800:5 is ingrained in my dna!
I guess everyone deserves a payday once in awhile. :)
Agreed. During the work on SpinRite v6.1 I was back in "DOS Land" and I was often using Peter's excellent utilities.
"Calibrate" is a bit of a sore spot for me, since they literally stole SpinRite. It wasn't Peter, though - it was a horrible CEO (named Ron Posner) who Peter put in place to run things as the company outgrew him. Peter and I had lunch and Peter had been told to purchase SpinRite outright from me because it was the #1 feature their users of "The Norton Utilites" wanted added. SpinRite was still very new and I'd already been around the block a few times by then. So I knew better than to sell it to them for any price. I said that in a few years I'd be glad to consider some sort of co-marketing arrangement.
After lunch, Peter and I went back to their offices in Santa Monica and met with Ron. He assumed that Peter had a deal and Peter had to say that he didn't.
We later heard from a Norton programmer that Ron had given a copy of SpinRite to one of their developers and said: "Go home and stay home until we have a clone of this."
The final proof that this is what they did was that after Calibrate came out - and EVERYONE who knew SpinRite ASSUMED that I had sold it to them since it looked and acted nearly identical - one of my guys looked inside Calibrate and found byte-for-byte identical code from SpinRite. There were some places where I wanted to see whether the BIOS supported some function. So I was placing some garbage code into the registers before calling the function and then checking them afterward to see whether they had been changed. CALIBRATE was using the =exact= same garbage values... since whoever copied SpinRite didn't know why I had chosen that data and was afraid to change it.
And after Calibrate was shipped, WE started receiving technical support calls from Calibrate users asking for help since Norton's support people were unable to support it (since they didn't really create it). We told those Norton customers that we'd be glad to offer them support after they purchased a copy of SpinRite... which we DID write and understand. :) Later, they dropped Calibrate from their offerings because it was causing them too much trouble and they were unable to support it.
Again... nothing against Peter. He's always been a good guy. Things just got out of his control.
"What's the difference between an ST-225 and an ST-238R? About a hundred bucks." -- common computer tech joke from the time
@@mal2ksc 😀
@@SGgrc The Norton tool I really miss is Speed Disk from Norton Utilities 2000. It was FAST and it would 100% defragment a drive in one pass, including the swap file. Unfortunately it didn't work in NT4, 2000, XP, or newer versions of Windows.
Far as I can tell, all the defragmenters for Windows after 9x and Me are essentially alternative frontends for Microsoft's ultra slow defragmenter. Speed Disk would start by making room at the start of the drive then move files there, collecting their parts scattered across the drive.
All the NTFS defraggers I've tried are nowhere near as efficient in the way they relocate files, nor do they do a 100% defrag in one pass, even on a non-system drive. It's as though with the end of the DOS based Windows era, everyone doing defragmenting software just gave up.
@@SGgrcJust WOW to that story!
wow after nearly 20-years of knowing about Spinrite we finally see and hear Steve Gibson talk about it and how to use it.
Thanks and interesting to hear you say about the SSD beginning sectors been the slowest.
I have couple NVMe's and one is the bootable hdd which I have never tested so be interested to see how this performs one day.
Thanks also for the insight on refreshing the drive using spinrite and this improved the hdd performance, learnt something new today :)
wow! I had stopped thinking about SpinRite when I moved to SSD - should have realized you'd be right there to keep my drives in tip-top shape! Thanks for the years of work.
Check out the "before" and "after" benchmarks on the SpinRite "Testimonials" page here: www.grc.com/sr/testimonials.htm The performance improvements are typically stunning.
Based upon the experience SpinRite v6.1's users are reporting, we're now recommending an annual pass of SpinRite at Level 3 over SSDs to keep them "fresh" and healthy. :)
Thank you, Steve. I first used SpinRite in 1986 to improve the performance on my 80286 PC. I still use it today. In my opinon, the greatest disk maintenance tool ever created.
Wow, SpinRite. I used that many years ago. This video brings back many fond memories.
I've never even noticed the drive benchmarks part of spinrite! OMG, I've always used "Readspeed" first. haha! well, don't I feel stupid now after owning SR6 for ... well, since it was released! My boss had SR5, and I loved what it could do, so bought 6 when it came out. The upgrade to 6.1's memory page I noticed... skipped past that and just went with my tried and true Level 2 and spacebar/enter combos! hehe, i'm gonna go play with that upgrade again now. Liked and sub'd mate, hope you get more sales from this from the algo, and with Dave Plumber also plugging the benefits of SR.
Spinrite was an amazing program years ago. Along with tools like Disktrix which would sort your HDD by program usage and speed up loading for more used apps. The inner ring of the HDD was faster than outer rings. Sometimes a UI is s sign of good engineering under the hood. Ot just works with no extras.
Odd, I think the outer tracks are faster.
@@saganandroid4175 I thought the inside ring was faster, but you are probably right. Either way, it would move the programs you use more there and it would make a big difference when loading from HDD.
NO, the outer rings were faster than the inner rings because hard drives always spin at the same RPM. Before SSDs were a thing this fact was exploited by only formatting say 10% to 20% of a drive since drives were formatted from perimeter inwards. So this put all the data on the fastest part.
This too would be so amazing if it had screen reader support as well! Thank you so much for all the years of hard work and teachings
There are some old DOS screen readers that support "Sound Blaster" cards. I don't know whether that might be of any use to you.
So glad to hear that Spinrite development continues! Any plans or process for testing drives in a home NAS device like Synology or QNAP?
Steve, I was so impressed when I recently received the email that you had released an update...after so many years!
Thanks Mike. I'm glad you still had the same email address! I sent out around 160,000 pieces of mail and, not surprisingly, many bounced! (Especially all those old CompuServe accounts! )
Thanks for sharing how Spinrite is working
Excellent - much needed video. Thanks Steve.
This brings back good memories.
At 3:31, you say the Level 3 should be used once per year on an SSD for maintenance - yet the screen says Level 3 is NOT recommended for SSDs. Could you please clarify?
SSD support wasn't available previously, but it looks like the new 6.1 version now includes it. I suppose the disclaimer just needs to be updated.
When you look at the amount of writing that an SSD can sustain -- typically many thousands of times its own size -- a single rewrite of its own size is a very small cost in return for the benefit.
I was probably overly and needlessly cautious about that scary pop-up in SpinRite v6.1, but I didn't want SpinRite users to be running and rerunning SpinRite over SSDs needlessly.
I think that once a year is VERY conservative and that it ought to also be sufficient.
@@SGgrc very helpful, thanks. SpinRight, back in the “spinning” days, has saved more times than I can count. Good to know that a Once Per Year SpinRight still makes sense. Great program!
@@SGgrc Thank you for keeping up the good work of promoting maintenance over replacement.
Do the refreshing writes in Level 3 get reflected in the TBW numbers reported in CrystalDisk and other diagnostics? According to my limited understanding, the physics of NAND gates puts a limit on the number of times they can be written to regardless of the reason. From what you've said, Level 2 should do more limited writing (none if no problems are detected). Thanks also for that.
A great product. I've used 6.1 for a long time now (went through 4.x and 5.x)...thanks Steve! Your talks on security were also interesting - you may want to mention those...
It's been updated ?!!?!?!? YEAHHHHH!!!!! Thank you for updating this for modern drives.
Yep. And even though it's "only" a "point release" (v6.1) it took 3.5 years of work and it's entirely reworked underneath. It uses "Flat Real Mode" (which the early PC gamers used) to get access to all of the machine's memory (even though it's in DOS) so v6.1 is able to use 16 megabyte buffers (it has three) and much more in order to run drives as fast as they can possibly go. And its entirely new levels perform way more work in way less time. So I'm very pleased with what it has become.
It's going to take me a while to get SpinRite moved over into Windows, which is where it's headed next. But as I was writing all of v6.1's new 32-bit code I knew that's where it was heading. So we'll have this new v6.1 for DOS until then. 👍
@@SGgrc I hope buy it this week. So If I make a HIREN bootable USB drive(WINDOWS PE) Can it run within Windows PE environment?
Look forward to trying this updated 2024 version! 😉
I used Spinrite 6.0 last week to fix a drive on an old Windows Vista PC before giving it to my grandchildren to mess around with. Now I'm going to upgrade to 6.1. Thanks Steve.
This is great to see. i was an early user of spinrite and this was my must have software. I'm so glad to see it's still being used today. I wonder if my old versions will still be of any use today.
Hi Steve. Thanks for this. I bought SpinRite at the 6.0 version, and I'm looking forward to grabbing the new version. I've got a couple of systems I'd like to run it on as a test. Thanks for the video.
Upgrading from 6.0 is easy. The first item under the "SpinRite" menu is "Upgrade to v6.1". Just drop your current SpinRite serial number into the form there and you'll receive download links for v6.1. :)
Steve Old Sock, good to see you! Where have you been?
I've been busy. I've been doing a weekly podcast (Security Now!) With Leo Laporte for the past 20 years. And checkout all of the useful freeware I've written for Windows (all in assembly language, of course): www.grc.com/freepopular.htm
I spent (wasted) 7 years of my life solving the username & password login problem with SQRL (the FIDO2 Passkeys system is what won). And then the most recent 4 years completely rewriting the "guts" of SpinRite 6.0. It looks nearly the same from the outside... But it's an entirely new beast under the covers.
Next up is a big update to our most popular Freeware, the DND Benchmark: www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm then a brand new super-fast super-secure data wiping utility, to be followed up by SpinRite 7.
So, as they say... Never a dull moment! 👍🏻
User since Spinrite ][ . You are certain generous to give this update away - I don't think anyone expected you to do that.
I made that promise about 10 years ago on the Security Now! podcast and I'm certain that some of our listeners purchased SpinRite 6.0 on the basis that they would someday get v6.1 as a free upgrade.
As the old saying goes “a promise is a promise.” Although it took 4 years of my life and I ended up completely rewriting SpinRite's "guts" to use 32-bit Flat Real Mode with multiple 16 megabyte buffers for absolute maximum performance, I have no regrets.
And it's not clear when we would have stumbled over “The Great SSD Slowdown” and using SpinRite to fix that if I hadn't done v6.1. 👍🏻
I recently purchased the latest spinrite for use on some older Microsoft surface laptops but found that EUFI makes spinrite unusable. I didn’t ask for a refund as I’m an avid fan of security now podcast and keen to support its ongoing development towards a version that will work on modern pcs and laptops. Steve perhaps you could cover why this doesn’t work for me in an upcoming episode as I was hoping to resurrect a slow surface go for my kids and sadly cannot. Hoping spinrite 7 will solve this issue. Cheers and thanks from Melbourne Australia, Rick
Which level to prevent data degradation on an properly functioning SSD, 2 or 3?
Level 2 only performs rewriting of specific locations in the event of the complete unreadability of that region. That's the fastest Level for data recovery since it cruises along only reading until it hits a problem. But the phenomenon everyone is observing with SSDs is that they can slow down incredibly while still eventually being able to recover their own data. So Level 2 may slow down at those locations but it won't rewrite.
Level 3 is what you need to use for SSDs. It rewrites everything once, regardless of how long the drive took to read the data. And the beauty of this is that the NEXT time the drive attempts to read that freshly rewritten data it can do so at full original "factory" speed. :)
SpinRite will caution its user when they choose any level above 2, since writing to NAND memory is know to ever-so-slightly fatigue the NAND cells. But SSDs can be entirely rewritten tens of thousands of time before anything actually wears out. And we're only doing it once. So SpinRite's caution is probably unnecessary... but I wanted to be responsible.
An annual once-per-year whole drive (Level 3) rewrite should be ample to keep drives (that don't spin) running fast and reliably. 👍🏻
@@SGgrc Thank you for the detailed response.
@@SGgrc Steve, if it's technically feasible, I think adding the functionality for SpinRite to scan/check multiple drives simultaneously would be extremely useful.
@@odkdsjf DEFINITELY! ALL future SpinRites will be fully multi-tasking and able to have multiple things going on at once. This wasn't feasible for v6.1 due to UI limitations. It would have required a significant reworking. As is was, I rewrote all of SpinRite's core logic over the course of 4 years... And all of THAT will be portable into Windows... Where a new UI will be designed specifically to allow SpinRite to become a mass storage maintenance and recovery workstation. 👍
@@SGgrc That version sounds amazing, I am looking forward to it. Hopefully future SpinRite versions will retain the capability to be executable from a Linux distro or live DOS-based bootable USB flash drive. That is useful for situations where Windows breaks, a dedicated Linux/non-OS repair workstation is used.
Thank you, again. Regards
Does it LLF MFM and RLL drives? ;@)
I think it does from what I remember from early DOS versions.
Actually, SpinRite 6.0 was released in 2004 (20 years ago) and SpinRite 5 several years before that. And each of these major moves forward removed some of the oldest features that were really no longer needed and were taking up space. BUT... =all= owners of SpinRite 6.1 also have licenses to SpinRite 6.0 and 5.0 ... so SpinRite 5.0 will definitely work on those older drives without any trouble!
9.8406% on screen dialog but 9.8405% in the log. Was this difference because each referred to different sectors? Perhaps ...05 was the last sector fully scanned and ...06 the next?
Thanks Steve for your excellent software and technical commentary in Security Now.
further down in the detailed log, it shows a rounded 9.841 value. it would be nice to be consistent. Although, I would much prefer to be able to enter sectors instead of fractions of percentages.
Will v7 be able to handle iMac Fusion Drives?
That’s amazing! ❤ I want a copy of SpinWrite
How does SpinRite relocate data safely on a fully-encrypted drive? I recall Steve mentioning that SP doesn't need to know about the File System used, but wouldn't moving bits around break the encrypted data?
All modern drives are able to remove troubled sectors from their addressable space. This is done in different ways depending upon the drive's technology. “Spinners” are able to “shift all of a drive's sectors downward” into a deliberately left empty "spares" area at the end of the region. This allows a bad sector to be "skipped over." The point, though, is that from the outside, nothing appears to have changed. There's no “visible” sector marked “bad” anymore. Drives are able to hide defective sectors so that they always appear to be 100% defect-free. And as a result of all this - as a result of the total transparency of defective sectors - SpinRite is able to show drives when their sectors are in trouble and thus induce drives to “spare out” these problems... and nothing needs to be changed within the file system, whether it's encrypted or not. 👍
@@SGgrc Thank you. With this and a little more reading, I cleared some misconceptions.
Good to see you replying in YT as well 👍. Thanks again.
@@SGgrc you've fixed the issue where newer drives couldn't be made to hot swap sectors that formatting marked as bad? I used Spinrite on some drives where the only way to make them use spare sectors was to give them a fresh format without scanning for errors. Then when Spinrite came to an iffy sector it could either restore it or force a reallocation.
Wow.. This used to be one of my top tools in my toolbox. I did not realize it would still work on ssd.
Right. Actually, it's not that it "still works" on SSD, though. I just spent 4 years of my life completely rewriting SpinRite. I left the user interface (mostly) alone, since it was fine. But nearly ALL of the "guts" of the program were rewritten in 32-bit assembly code. It's now a screaming demon, and it can do wonders for today's SSD storage! :) Just check out the recent testimonials: www.grc.com/sr/testimonials.htm
Memory test. Nice idea. Do you do march tests?
SpinRite's new built-in RAM memory test is just a simple random pattern write then read-back. SpinRite had a development testing community of around 600 users so several of them had machines with RAM problems. We compared SpinRite's test with the classic MemTest86 and they both found errors at the same rate. So SpinRite just writes random patterns and rereads them to verify. 👍
Have used SpinRite since the early 80's after talking with the head of support at Compaq. He stated that they used SpinRite to test hard drives before they where installed in Compaq devices. The bad ones were weed out and sent back to the manufacturer so they did not become a support issue at the very start for Compaq.
Just wish I could use my new SpinRite 6.1 version with my Apple M1 MacBook Air. Steve talked the other day about a solution that it looks like I am going to use.
Create new macOS/UNIX USB install with latest version. FULL backup using Time Machine to two separate storage drives. First is the one I am already using. Second is a external SSD which I have tested with SpinRite 6.1 on level 3. Then after this is done I am going to do a fresh "Nuke and repave, or flatten as Microsoft likes to call it" install of macOS/UNIX and then full restore from the Time Machine backup.
God tier user interface
Wow, haven't used SpinRite since the late 90's when I was a Bench tech. Nice to see its still relevant.
Steve, just wanted some clarification. You mentioned it is a good idea to run level 3 once a year for maintenance but on the blue screen it says that level three is NOT recommended for SSD drives. Used caps because that is how it was written in the description.
really love inControl
13:02 you talk about moving to Level 3 to work on an SSD. Yet at 3:04 the screen clearly states that Level 3 "is NOT recommended for SSDs...". Can you explain why the contradiction?
Many thanks Steve - cheers
Very nice. One day I need to get a copy.
Not sure how long, new PCs will include legacy BIOS mode. Will Spinrite be UEFI compatible some day? I know (Free)dos isn't, so not sure how that would be achieved. Would more or less, require it to be its own OS? Or use BSD/Linux instead?
You're 100% right. As I noted in my reply to your other question, I purchased the source code for a proprietary embedded OS known as RTOS-32. So all future SpinRites will be Windows apps that can run either under Windows or on their own OS that can boot on either BIOS or UEFI. 👍
"...Crucial (tm) for this RAM to be reliable". Sorry, I could not resist :)
Wow, SpinRite has come a long way since I used it to defrag my ST-225 !
Have you given any consideration to a native EFI version?
Yes. Several years ago I purchased an embedded real-time OS called RTOS-32. (www.on-time.com/rtos-32.htm) SpinRite v7 will be a Windows app... but this RTOS-32 has a Win32 clone API, so SpinRite 7 for Windows will also run on this RTOS-32, which will essentially be SpinRite's own natively booting OS, and it will boot on either BIOS or UEFI firmware. 👍
Will this handle SAS controller + drives?
I wish. But, no. Once we get over to SpinRite 7 for Windows then SpinRite will be able to take advantage of Windows drivers. But there are no such drivers that I'm aware of for DOS, and the SAS controller hardware is neither IDE, ATA nor AHCI compatible... all which v6.1 DOES have its own high performance drivers for.
Does any program like this exist for the Commodore 64? I have floppy disks that are over 30 years old and would really love to test their reliability as well as refresh their data with such an easy to use program.
The Commodore 64 drives were amazing for their time. As with the Atari drives, as I recall the drives themselves were quite intelligent and took high-level commands, like "Format" and then did all the work themselves. But that means there was no low-level access of the sort that you're looking for.
I had to spin right license years and years ago. It's been a long time since I've seen that disc. My PCs I don't think we're really powerful enough to run it well. I remember trying to run it on what was a large drive for its time - maybe 500 GB - and giving up after it been running for several days without completing. I saw the new version mentionioned in a Dave's Garage video and thought I'd check out this walkthrough.
Can this work if the drive is encrypted?
Yes. 100%. SpinRite is “encryption agnostic” because it's operating below the file system level, directly upon the drive's physical media. So it will run equally well on an entirely empty drive, on a drive filled with “white noise”, or anything in between. 👍
Is it still written in 100% ASM? :)
Yes! 100% assembly language (and still quite small.) The code now requires a 32-bit processor with protected mode support since SpinRite v6.1 uses "flat real mode" to access 16 megabyte data transfer buffers. But all owners of v6.1 also have licenses for v6.0 and v5.0 ... this is so that really really old systems are still usable. 👍
Is this software helpful to solid state drives?
YES!! And THAT was the biggest surprise of all. Near the beginning of this work we discovered that regions of SSD that are only ever read and never written -- like much of the file system and the operation system once they're installed - tend to slow down over time due to something known as "Read Disturb". (Search for the phrase "Read Disturb" on the 'Net and you'll see what a HUGE problem this is for modern SSDs which are cramming so much data into so small a place.)
By rewriting these regions, SpinRite is able to restore a drive's original factory performance. I've placed some customer before and after performance photos on SpinRite testimonials page here: www.grc.com/sr/testimonials.htm so you can see for yourself!
"Daves Garage" RUclips channel featured Spinrite in his video. He is a retired Microsoft engineer who did most his work in assembly back in his day working on Windows. It was a great review/explanation of Spinrite. He also rebuilds full size PDP-11's! In his garage.
Fascinating! I ran SpinRite on my 74 GB 10,000 RPM VelociRaptor drive back in 2005 and it gave me weird error messages. I never had issues with the drive so I didn't trust the utility at the time. Who knows what actually caused the errors. I had no idea it is still being maintained and it does sound great for SSDs.
I love you steve !
Back when I used to listen to the Twit podcasts, I thought there was discussion of making a Mac version, but another project (Squirrel) had to be completed first. I'm guessing that a Mac version is never coming?
My ssd get stuck at 1.934% running spinrite on either level 2 or 3 does that mean I need a clean install?
Will this work on bitlocker encrypyed drives?
Yes! Perfectly. Since SpinRite operates at the "physical" level of drives - below their file systems - it is completely "file system agnostic". It will run on empty drives, on drives with foreign file systems, on drives filled with white noise, on encrypted drives, and anything in between. 👍
Steve, you’re a geek and an old school white hat hacker. It shows in your products, your presentation style, and the fact that you’re doing everything from DOS where there is no real OS overhead or interference from the OS.
The computer world has tried to move beyond guys like you and I, but it wouldn’t really be able to function well without guys like us.
Hah! Thanks for your note, Geoff. And, yeah... guilty as charged. I sometimes explain that I was a nerd long before that became "fashionable". And you're right about the benefits of DOS. There IS no "OS" there... mostly just a program loader and some file system and console APIs.
My plans for the future are to first move SpinRite to Windows since I CAN still get good low-level access through USB and I've seen with the release of v6.1 that everyone wants to use USB to connect drives. I also purchased the source code for a real-time OS (RTOS-32) that was at end-of-life because no one was buying upgrades because it had no bugs. (My kind of software!) AND it's a Win32 API emulator... so that will allow me to have "Pro" versions that are bootable and Windows releases that run under Windows. :)
And, as you said... "old school geek". But I LOVE computers! 👍
@ I’m a decade younger than you, started on the Commodore Pet in 1979/1980, and Apple II in 1980. I still remember the Gibson Light Pen (I didn’t have one, but a friend did). I’ve written in a dozen or so programming languages, but my favorites are still BASIC (modern compiled versions), and ASM. I’ve written ASM for half a dozen processors. Details vary, but it’s all pretty much the same.
Steve, how does SpinRite behave with formats other than Fat, Fat32 or NTFS. Founds on Linux partitions EXT2 through 4?
Great question. I should have mentioned that. SpinRite is 100% compatible with any and all file systems, and even encrypted drives, since it operates down at the physical sector level and doesn't concern itself at all with what's in the drive's sectors. Since all IDE and later drives are able to handle defective sector relocation at the hardware level, SpinRite works with the drive to "show it" there's a problem, after which the drive will take a bad sector (or 4K block of sectors) and will replace it/them with a good new spare.
So, SpinRite will run on anything. 👍
I thought this software had simply hit a wall when we abdicated physical control over cylinders, heads, and sectors. Glad to see I was wrong!
It's true that SpinRite needed to completely change to keep up with the times. It has completely abandoned all notion of cylinders, heads and sectors (CHS) addressing in favor of seeing all mass storage media as an unbroken linear region of storage.
But the BIG surprise was the discovery of the degree to which today's solid state drive media was slowing down WITHOUT generating errors. SSD controllers will struggle mightily to read their data. And they can almost always succeed. But they should NOT have to work so hard. We found that this was due to a phenomenon known as "Read Disturb" and that it could be completely resolved by simply rewriting that data once.
So that meant that SpinRite was no longer only useful for spinning drives!
Great Program. I assume this does not work with Apple Silicon Macs?
I'm just curious. If I ran the latest Spinrite on an old computer having an old drive with a Shugart interface would it still work the way it used to?
Thank you, Steve, for this great tool! Is it possible to mark one drive for level 2 run, and then a mechanical drive for level 3 run, all in one shot? :)
As you suspect, SpinRite doesn’t have “per drive” levels… but it has extensive command line automation. So it would be very easy to have SpinRite run at different levels on different drives.
@@SGgrc Thank you very much for the answer! I'm going to buy it very soon, that's why I was curious about such automation. :)
Spinrite was amazing, back in *1995* .
SpinRite on harpannut tosi paljon eteenpäin sen jälkeen kuin viimeksi käytin sitä 40 lähes vuotta sitten.
"Kiitos paljon kommentistasi. Olet oikeassa, että vuosikymmenten aikana SpinRiteä on pidetty ajan tasalla kehittämällä sitä eteenpäin. Ja paljon enemmän on vielä tulossa!" (with thanks to ChatGPT for the Finnish translations!)
Nice to hear from the creator in the flesh. I relied on Spinrite some decades ago. Maybe I will give it another whirl 😊
I know this asking a lot, but you are one of the world's premiere assembly language programmers - it would be so cool if you could rewrite the critical calculation/evaluation modules of the open source StockFish chess engine, into your super-fast assembly code, thereby making it the most formidable in the world! - Thank you so much!!
THAT would be such a kick-ass fun thing to do... but I have so much still that I NEED to get done. I'm going to be hugely improving GRC's DNS Benchmark, then a new product to do the reverse of SpinRite - super-fast super-secure drive data wiping - then SpinRite really needs to move to Windows. So... yeah... if I only had the time!
What is this mysterious "CD-ROM" of which you speak?
Can spin refresh my 3-1/2 inch floppies?
Yes - Quite well, in fact. But you should use SpinRite v5.0 for that. It contains the best diskette recovery/restoration of all. Any SpinRite 6.x owner is entitled to both v6.0 and v5.0. When you obtain your software download link (which anyone can get at any time) you copy and paste it into the browser URL instead of clicking on it. Then simply change the filename at the end from “spinrite.exe” to “sr5.exe” and you'll receive a licensed copy of SpinRite 5.
SpinRite v6.1 has a MUCH superior USB formatting and setup. So you should use your v6.1 to prepare a bootable USB. Then just copy SpinRite v5.0 to it. After booting, SpinRite 6.1 will auto-start. So hit ESC to back out of 6.1 to DOS, then start v5.0 by entering "sr5" and pressing Enter. 👍🏻
I kept a copy of my first spinrite, v2, but when I moved to mac I guess somewhere the receipt got lost. Guess it is time for an update.
❤ Steve and SpinRite! Been using for *decades*. What other software has a lifetime like that!?
And... this was only the "catch up" release. I still have much more in store. 👍
Have you seen the PDP in Dave's Garage?