Spinrite6 in the background

...as opposed to taking over the whole machine by booting into Spinrite which uses FreeDos I've made a virtual machine - 640k in size - using a spinrite iso, giving it access to the host hard drive. This enables me to carry on my work with SR operating in the background something you cannot normally do. What do you think, any Spinrite users here?
(Thanks to Eric G a Spinrite user)

 

Yes it can but I suppose it depends how precious that lost data is.
Spinrites data recovery, DynaStat just keeps on trying and trying to recover infact I've had SR run into the second day, did it recover the data? yes - infact the failed drive ran for quite awhile after.
Mostly though I use it for maintenance and the time depends on how much it has to process. A 250Gig NTFS drive takes me around 6 hrs. FAT 2hrs.
Also you can always pause and start where you left off at some other time.

 

I regularly run SpinRite on my drives for maintenance and - touch wood - so far so good even with old ones.
I also had a chance to use it for data recovery once on a friend's drive, and even though it took some time, it recovered stuff that even FinalData or Easy Recovery Pro couldn't - top marks!
I like the concept of running it on a VM, it's very clever, I just wonder if there are any operations one should avoid from taking while running it.

 

newbino :

Exactly what I was thinking and why I posted. Anyone have any thoughts?

 

Im afraid that "Eric G a Spinrite user" has made a DANGEROUS suggestion.

The whole point of booting into a dos mode is so that you can guarantee spinrite and nothing else access to the drive.

In virtualised enviroment Spinrite will be running under one process along with other processes that the host OS is running all sharing access to the hdd.
How do you know what the host OS is doing when you are running spinrite in virtual mode, eg writting data at the same time as spinrite.
You have no guarantee that spinrite has 100% control of your drive and that is important when your try to recover a disc. You could easily make things worse.

 

I thought the same as you nickr as I listened to Steve Gibson liking the idea, what happens when the virtual machine and host use the drive at the same time!
Anyway I've checked this out on a test hard drive with no apparent problems - and waiting for another reply as I'm not sure that a VM would use it at the same time as the real OS.

 

Ok, this is an edited repost of the above. Liking the idea of the OP I wrote Spinrite tech support for more info.
They said that they were surprised to find out that some beta testers were running Spinrite under VMware, surprised that it worked and somewhat unnerved by the idea.
They don't like the idea of that, and don't officially endorse it. But they also recognize that apparently it IS possible to run it with vm.

 

Listening to the podcast where I gleaned this idea from the author of Spinrite Steve Gibson, also says 'it'll work' and thinks it is a cool idea.
Still, I think I'm gonna use Spinrite as it was intended.

 

I've been trying this out now for a few days and everything seems okay, although still even with everything turned off in the VM such as caching I'm not so brave to use it on my primary drives/partitions (and I believe as nickr pointed out you shouldn't use the drive when recovering data,) but rather I've added secondary and usb drives meaning that I can just pop in a hard drive to the cradle or switch on a drive.
Now with no need to boot the comp into Spinrite but rather just start the Spinrite VM it saves a considerable time enabling me to carry on working.

 

I recently merged 4 partitions on a drive I have, doing 2 at a time, while booted with paragon rescue disk.

Then I had 10mb that were unallocated when done and resized it to full utilization.

When XP booted after doing all that, it lasted a couple of hours finishing an automatic chkdsk @ boot-time, seemed to have gone through all files to correct security descriptors... it went fast and went through all the files it seems... I didn't get a good feeling from that and expected the worse... Then the regret hovered over me for not wanting to copy things over to another HD I have and reformat the disk to assure integrity and thought everything would be ok... DAMMIT

Now some of my music files are "crosslinked" I guess and other files are not accessible/corrupt.

For example... I can double click on a sanatra mp3 and hear something else from a different artist play in its entirity..



Long ago Spinrite6 was considered a must have, and haven't used it for more years then I can remember....

Does anyone consider Spinrite can help me in this circumstance?? If not what would be your recommendation to get things back to normal??

Can anyone recommend a forum focused on data recovery?

Thanks

 

Hi mikeo1313, it certainly wont harm in giving SR a try at level 2, DynaStat will try very hard in recovering the data.

I find the best approach is to use SR periodically, say twice to four times a year for maintenance - before a problem arises!

Theres many forums focusing on data recovery but perhaps throw a question over at the GRC news group.

 

Thanks for the info. I'll give SR a try..

Last night I did a search for Data recovery forums and went through some that resulted from your google string, and noticed I allready went through some of those... unfortunately the grc news group is read only but it also may be I'm doind something wrong.. idk... and most data recovery forums besides 1 I posted in, http://forums.getdata.com , have little to hardly any activity. One of the top on the search query also has registration closed...

if SR helps I'll post back... but,,, even if SR fixes everything, I'm still going to backup my data and reformat the drive... , just to up the trust/confidence level

Ironically chkdsk and NDD doesn't detect any errors, {ndd w/o surface test though,,, was doubtful/scared of doing a surface test}