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A friend this week had her laptop give her the dreaded blue screen every time she booted. After a trip to the Theif Geek Squad who told her if would be $1500+ to recover the data from the drive, I gave SpinRite a try first. I booted to the disk and ran a level 2 recovery scan. In a couple of hours it found a bunch of hits. Rebooted to the hard drive and presto, back up and running. After schooling her on how to back up data and doing so, I ran a higher level scan that found a bunch more errors. And now she is back up and fully functional.
SpinRite is a standalone disk diagnostic and recovery tool which works at the bit level rather than the file system level. It uses the SMART system on hard drive to it full extent to recover the data on the drive.
Here’s an interview with the creator, who gives some great information on the product and hard drive functions.
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March 3rd, 2009 at 12:01 pm
yea
but hey have no phone support. they do not tell you this when they are taking your money or advertising – which is less than honest. you wait forever to get any emails back – email support is understaffed. Getting it to boot up is not easy for regular people. they gloss over the first step on how to get it to boot up on a system. I tried to get it to boot up on two computers and it did not work. so it is not easy people. Do not let them make you think it is.
not satisfied.
March 3rd, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Well Steve, it sounds like if your having trouble with a simple task like booting from a cd, this is an undertaking that you should not take on. This is really more of a tool for a power user.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Yes, a regular computer user should not buy this product.
I had about 20 email to GRC and they could not solve the problem. I had the same problem of not being able to boot this program from a cd or usb drive on three different computers – so the tired refrain about “your system must have a problem” really does not apply – the product is not a stand-alone product – it requires many other steps/softwares just to start off. If you look at the videos online about the product, they gloss over how ones gets this to start working on a system and all the exception and hang-ups you can encounter. I understand the reason now.
Once you start talking to them, they start recommending all types of other software you need to get to create a bootable media. They also suggest bootable floppys which practically do not exist anymore. Here is an example of what is suggested when a usb flash drive does not work:
http://www.bootdisk.com/pendrive.htm
This will give you an idea of all the exceptions and difficulties getting a usb flash drive boot – its insane.
March 10th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Steve,
Booting from a USB drive is unsupported on a great many systems, unless the drive makes itself look like a CD-ROM to the system. This has nothing to do with SpinRite. If you just burn the software to a CD and boot from a CD (something all systems can do, if they support CD-ROM at all), it comes right up with zero “steps” required. A couple more keystrokes to select options and it’s running.
If you can’t do this, you are quite unqualified to be running this sort of low-level diagnostic/recovery software and should ask a friend to help.
March 17th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Not everyone is born with mouse in hand. If you won’t take the time to spell out the steps for booting how will we ever learn? I suppose I shouldn’t drive a car because I don’t work on the engine? I’ve had the same problem as Steve. Spinrite is supposed to help only those who are Nerds???
March 17th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
Joe.. not everyone is born with a wrench in hand either.. you can buy an engine hoist, but would you use it in a Porche? no.. learn to be a mechanic before taking it on – > learn basics of computers before trying to run a tool like this.
April 13th, 2009 at 6:20 am
Hello!
I have a question. I have two partitions. One of them had my important stuff. i dont know what happened, but some of my folders containing important stuff became unknown files of 0 kb. Will this software help to recover those folders and data, and how?
June 12th, 2009 at 5:15 am
In my opinion, Spinrite, compared to most tools that I know of, is the best. It’s pulled drives back from death that other apps GPF’d on. They say they have a money back guarantee too. A lot of software companies don’t offer that. And as for making it bootup, it seems pretty simple. I just run the program and it gives me options for making boot diskettes, iso images, etc. Booting from USB is tricky and not always supported. That’s a USB issue though, not a Spinrite issue.