Steve M Gibson

Hard disk drives in the 1980s and early 1990s were not very fault-tolerant. All too frequently, they got "flaky" with daily use. The heads tended to drift "off track." File data would often become corrupted bit-by-bit and sector-by-sector. Files so affected could not be accessed by the programs that created them.

Steven Gibson came to the rescue with SpinRite, a remarkable piece of data recovery and disk drive repair software. SpinRite tests the data surfaces of magnetic disks, analyzes their contents, and refreshes the magnetic disk surfaces to allow them to operate more reliably, at least temporarily.

By performing statistical analysis on numerous tests of a hard drive's magnetic surface, SpinRite is often able to reconstruct data from damaged sectors. In those cases where complete reconstruction is impossible, SpinRite can extract all intact bits from a partially damaged sector, copying them to a new block, thereby minimizing the amount of data lost.

When the program encounters a sector with errors that cannot be corrected by the disk drive's error-correcting code, SpinRite tries to read the sector hundreds of times to determine, by comparing the successive results, the most probable value of each bit. The data is then saved onto a healthy sector on the same disk.

If a hard drive's circuit board, drive motors, or other mechanical parts are defective, SpinRite cannot help. But when a hard drive has begun to develop faults on its magnetic surface, SpinRite may be able to extend its usable life long enough to carry out successful file recovery with other file retrieval software.

The first version of SpinRite was released in 1988. Version 3.1 described in this user's manual was released in 1993.

SpinRite is run from a bootable floppy disk on a computer with an x86 processor, independent of the operating system installed on the host computer.

SpinRite is written in assembly language.… (mais)