Depends on the BIOS and the motherboard.  Won't run on any of mine unless I load 
additional drivers (older MBs), which isn't a good idea when working at the hardware 
level if you really want to protect your data.  Spinrite only tries to recover data 
and move it to a different area when the media is failing.  Has no other recovery 
option, so the only other things it is good for are checking readability and refreshing 
disk surfaces (which can corrupt data on an unstable system I have found).

Only an average of about 1 out of 200 drives I work on actually needs or has a problem 
that Spinrite can fix.  The electronics seem to fail more than the media, unless 
the heads are crashing, but then the heads are usually being damaged too.  Otherwise, 
I use professional software to recover data or fix corrupted partition tables.  At 
least this has been my experience on newer drives in the past 2-3 years but then 
that's when I started using all Seagates, as I had some terrible reliability issues 
on other brands when running under higher heat conditions.







On Tuesday, April 15, 2008 at 12:21 pm, Ari wrote:

>I use Sprinrite on USB drives all the time.  It's slower, of course, but it works. 

> While it's very possible that the sort of damage is something Spinrite can't fix, 

>it's also possible that it's something it CAN fix; only way to find out is to try.

>

>Otherwise, I totally agree.

>

>

> 

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