rich@ersys.edmonton.ab.ca (Richard Hempsey) (06/01/91)
Several people have sent me mail asking what Spinrite II is, and what
does it do, so here's some info (some from the manual, some of it my
own words).
Spinrite II is an MS-DOS based hard drive maintenance utility that
(among other things) non-destructively low-level formats your hard
drive. From page 1 of the manual:
"SpinRite reads and repairs damaged, unreadable, and uncorrectable
data, spots and removes soft and correctable errors long before the
become problems, certifies fundamental drive/controller data
compatibility, determines and resets a hard disk's sector interleave
for maximum data throughput, performs the most thorugh surface defect
detection, analysis, and data relocation ever, and renews and restores
the low-level format on hard disk drives.
"Best of all, it does all this without disturbing any of the data that
is already on the drive.."
My opinion: best utility you can buy. Should be available at most
computer stores. Price would probably be around US$65 - 75.
It fixed 3 errors on my hard drive that the manufacturer found, but
found 2 others and locked them out. Be warned though, the deepest
testing level does read/write testing 84 times on each sector of the
disk - it took about 21 hours for my 32meg HD. It also adjusted the
interleave, and increased the speed by about 5 times!
It (claims) to work with any MFM,RLL, or ERLL drive, requires DOS 2.1
or later, and works with Compaq DOS 3.31, MS-DOS 4.0, and many
third-party disk partitioning device drivers (such as OnTrack's Disk
Manager.)
(sorry about the verbosity, a lot of it comes directly from the manual
and package). (Disclaimer: I have absolutely nothing to do with
Gibson Research, I just like the product.)
Richard Hempsey at ersys!nowhere!rich@nro.cs.athabascau.ca
or rich@ersys.edmonton.ab.ca
or ...!alberta!aunro!ersys!nowhere!rich
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