Will SpinRite become relevant again?

What you just commented on is what they have been spending time on advancing. Maybe you should get into their news group and see what they are tackling. The group says what they have come up with solves or very highly minimizes what you think has not been dealt with or can't be dealt with.

 

In my case, it may NOT be relevant any more. I'm not a certified repair guy, I'm just an old guy that started with an Apple ][+ and now I'm just a couple of clicks smarter than people who don't know a motherboard from the mother-in-law. However, I've been able to use Spinrite before, and I always thought it might make a good maintenance tool, and if God forbid I had a crash may, just maybe, it would save my bacon. So, I thought, it's been a long time since I used it, so I burned the Spinrite ISO file to a DVD, and voila it booted, then when I hit "4" to put it into maintenance mode it said "Invalid Opcode, followed by 1006 CD00.... and the rest of a hex string. I sent an e-mail to Spinrite and I guess Steve hasn't kept up with basic changes as they said Spinrite, I guess, is picky about what type of SATA drive you may or may not have, or if your BIOS is acceptable to Steve's programming... anyway I used Belarc to take a picture of my system and sent it as an e-mail attachment to GRC and I'll find out if I can actually use the program or not. I'm sure one of you pro guys could figure it out, but I don't want to pay hundreds of dollars to a pro shop to make a $89 program that's worked in the past... that won't work now. OTOH, maybe GRC can figure it out, or talk Steve into stopping long enough in one place to make Spinrite recognize really exotic stuff like SATA hardware and Intel MBs and their attendant BIOS (hmm how do you make bios pural?... bioses? or biosies?) Just my $.02

 

Please don't ever rely on SpinRite or any other magic disk utility. Just go with the time-honored solution of making periodic backups. These are guaranteed to save your bacon.

I've long ago moved on from recommending and using sprinrite. It hasn't been updated in god knows how long, and is incompatible with some big disks on modern interfaces. I don't know the specifics nor do I care at this time.

And with the advent of the affordable and durable SSD nearly upon us, SpinRite is even less relevant than ever before.