I’ve been around computers a long time. Not as long as some like Steve Gibson of GRC, but long enough that my first programming experience was on an IBM punch card machine and programs were written and run in Fortan V on a mainframe in downtown Winnipeg from a remote card-reader at my High School (go Westwood!).
Grade 11 saw the delivery of the famed Trash-80’s (model III’s) mid-year, and grade 12 we got some model IV’s and Apple IIe’s. Mr. Houck was a pretty smart Comp Sci teacher, and he let a few of us play with these machines any time we wanted. One day in grade 12 he showed me my attendance card with a line through it and he’d written across it “independent study.” I took that to heart (somewhat to his chagrin I’m sure), as from that point on, I walked in an out of his class literally any time I wanted (even during lectures to other classes).
In return, I had to keep up my marks (not hard – comp sci in grade 12 in the early 80’s was cake), AND show him how things worked with these new-fangled computers. I think he just liked seeing us kids get a kick out of them.
They were awesome (there was a dedicated @ key – genius). I bought a model IV that very year, and to this day it sits in a box under my basement stairs (and every time my wife sees it I get asked when I’m getting rid of it!). Dual 5-1/4” floppy drives and 64K of RAM (expandable to 128K!). The expansion connector on the bottom allowed the connection of a cassette machine for ‘tape’ backup, and for external hard drives. If I recall, 20MB was a monster drive back then.
Long preamble, but what I learned early on was that data storage mediums were important. Pretty much all my floppies were bought as single-sided, that we converted to double sided by cutting out the write-protect notch on the cover, and using a single-hole punch on the inside part of the cover (hard to describe). PICTURE. For a couple of years in the early 90’s when I went back to university, I actually used it to write essays using Scripsit. It’s been in a box ever since (I wonder if those disks are still readable?).
By the year 2004, I had seen my share of hard drives fail, and I’d never given much thought to it beyond try to fix with ‘chkdsk’, and if that didn’t help, get a new one. It was then than I fell into the IT business after working with computers from an admin perspective off and on for the previous 25-odd years, and thought perhaps there was a better answer.
Along came Podcasts, and I listened to a lot of diverse podcasts, but loved the techie ones of course, including SecurityNow! (still the most popular tech podcast there is), and it was there I learned about Spinrite.
Spinrite has saved me more than once – and I’m writing this on my Dell E6500 laptop that I had installed a new Seagate Momentus XT 500GB drive on only 2 weeks ago, that earlier tonight would not boot. It refused to even get detected. So I popped it out, slaved it to my dedicated test machine and ran it on level 2. 2 hours later, I’m back up and happy.
I don’t know of any other tools that do what Spinrite does. What I do know is that it works. Before I bought it (I have 2 copies, and have had clients buy them for themselves), I did my due diligence and read up on it and decided it looked legit. No kidding. Though some drives are FUBAR, it has been worth way more than I paid for it.
As long as we have spinning drives, Spinrite will have a place in my IT tool chest. If you have a drive that won’t boot, or your system is constantly blue-screening (the infamous ‘blue screen of death’ or BSOD), Spinrite is worth a shot. You do have to pay for it first. If it doesn’t fix your drive, and you want your money back, just ask GRC for a refund.
I’ve never met Steve (or Leo), and my listening of SecurityNow! has been reduced to a handful of episodes a year (loved the ‘dog-killer’), and I get nothing out of promoting Spinrite other than the joy of knowing I’m giving props to a truly great product that does exactly what it says it will do – fix your hard drive if it’s possible to be fixed.
Thanks Steve.
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