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SpinRite 1.x

SystemSystem
edited 5:13AM in Product Comments
imageSpinRite 1.x

SpinRite, by Gibson Research, is a tool that can diagnose, repair, and rejuvenate the low-level formatting and optimize the interleave of MFM and RLL (ST412/506 interface) hard disk drives. Its pattern testing ability is also useful for verifying the operation of SCSI and IDE hard drives.

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Comments

  • whisperingmodemwhisperingmodem
    edited 5:16AM
    Versions 1-3 were primarily used to low-level format and burn-in test drives of the 1985~1990 era. That was pre-IDE where 8-bit and 16-bit ISA controller cards were semi-specific to the model of the drive and tended to use 2 cables per drive. An RLL controller could get more usable space from the same drive than using an MFM controller because of the analog-digital encoding and hardware compression. When controllers were changed, it was necessary to completely redo the magnetic encoding on the drive and so SpinRite swoops in to do what (assuming using a variant of DOS) FORMAT.COM was (probably) unable to do by itself (more than repeatedly calling INT 9 AH=05 once per track), and not with the level of verification SR did. It would format and then repeatedly write and read a track over and over again sort of like memtest86/+. FORMAT and FDISK didn't do this. The end result is it would generate a bad sector map that should agree with the bad sector map printed on the drive itself by the factory. The bad sector map would then need to be translated into a bad *cluster* map in FAT12 or FAT16, likely nixing other good sectors too if sectors/clusters > 1.

    tl;dr: SpinRite was an essential PC-compatible bench tool for early HDDs.
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