[comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware] Caution regarding Spinrite v1.0 and DTC controllers

richard@smosjc.UUCP (Richard Asano) (04/30/91)

I decided it was time to do another scrubbing on my hard drive.  Since I
could not find my Spinrite version 1.1, I popped in my version 1.0 (it was
late at night and I was tired) and rebooted.  After all, I had used version
1.0 many, many times before with no problems.  I did not realize at the
time, I had never used version 1.0 with this particular system configuration.

I went through all of the preliminary steps when it said the throughput for
all of the interleaves (1:1, 2:1, ..... 8:1) were all 178,000.  Obviously,
something was wrong.  I escaped out of the program and found my version 1.1
and rebooted on it.  IT COULD NOT RECOGNISE MY HARD DRIVE.

A quick phone call to Gibson this morning told me what I did not want to
hear.  Spinrite version 1.0 cannot handle the extra sector DTC puts onto
the drive and reformats it improperly.  Even though I had escaped out of
the program just after it had checked the optimum interleave it was already
too late.  The damage was done.

Sigh....  Now I need to low level format the drive.

Versions 1.1 and 2.0 will work okay with the DTC controller.  My advise is
if you have version 1.0 lying around, get rid of it.  I will.

If someone knows of any way to recover from this that Gibson would not
tell me, I would be very interested to hear, especially since I did not
do a backup immediately before running Spinrite like I should have.

Richard Asano
uunet!smosjc!richard