"a computer is a tool, it should just work"

Spinrite is STILL RUNNING from starting a week ago. Got bogged down on a really messed up region at 55% progress and going sector by sector... could take weeks at this rate...

I think I need a priest and a gravestone for it

Spinrite needed nearly a month to finish his disk, but it repaired it 100% in the end and he got all of the data off!

How SpinRite PREVENTS disk crashes

Running SpinRite periodically prevents disk crashes by containing any problems that are discovered. SpinRite examines the data storage surface of a drive one region at a time. It first reads the data out of a region, then exercises that region with patterns of data that SpinRite has determined are the most difficult for the drive to read and write. In this way, any weak and failing areas within the region are located and removed from use while none of the drive's original data is being stored there. Only after the region has been made absolutely safe, will the drive's original data be restored to that area.

How SpinRite PREDICTS disk failure

Drives begin to fail when they have increasing difficulty reading and writing data that they once read and wrote without trouble. SpinRite reads and re-writes the entire surface of the drive, reporting everything it finds. Thus, it is able to provide early warning of increasing numbers of regions that are becoming troublesome for the drive. The drive can then be backed up and removed from service before a complete catastrophe results in loss of any data.

Since NO OTHER UTILITY analyzes the surface of a drive WHILE IT CONTAINS DATA, NO OTHER UTILITY can warn its user of imminent drive failure.

For example, Scandisk's "surface analysis test" is read-only and provides no exercise for the drive or the data surfaces. Just before a drive fails, Scandisk indicates that everything is completely fine, whereas SpinRite goes nuts showing the user that the drive is near death.

Which utility would you rather be using?

How SpinRite RECOVERS After a Crash

Post-Disaster Data Recovery is perhaps SpinRite's strongest and most unique capability since so much more can be done than any other disk utility has ever bothered to do.

Speaking of which, Scandisk is probably guilty of more data loss than any other utility ever created. Since everyone has Scandisk, everyone uses it. But few people realize that Scandisk does NOTHING other than discard any data that it can't read.

By comparison, SpinRite never takes a drive's data for granted. It contains and deploys an extensive arsenal of data recovery techniques and technologies which pull any drive's data back from oblivion. SpinRite is even able to recover most of the data in a sector that can never be perfectly read, and which any other utility software discards in full.