[ale] what exactly does a long smart hdd test do?

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

Hi Mike,

I don't think that discredits the project, I think it's a wise design. Here's why. The most recent version of SpinRite came out in 2004 and has a history going back to 1988. The program designer is planning an update, but it's not out yet. Nevertheless, that version will work on modern drives. I don't know how deeply SpinRite interacts with the bios. I do know it boots from its own copy of freedos and runs from there. The product was designed to work with any PC compatible computer, be it PC, Linux box, or Mac. It can even work with Tivo or iPod drives, etc. if you take the drive out and attach it to a PC. It needs to be able to have total control over the drive, including disabling some of the drive's normal error correction, so it can do analysis and detect problems. It can't have the OS in the way and interfering with it's operation. The primary target machine it was designed to run on was no doubt Windows machines. Back in 2004, those machines were running various combinations of Win 95, Win98, Win ME, Win 2000, Win NT, and Win XP. I don't think any of the Windows systems allow the kind of unfettered access to the drive that SpinRite needs. Also, as far as I know, there isn't a way to dismount an internal drive in Windows and work on it, as you potentially can in Linux. Even if you could dismount a drive, the system needs to run on the system drive, and the average user doesn't have any way to boot a Windows machine without doing so from the system drive. So, the best design choice was to make a product that booted itself. That way, the OS isn't running, all the drives are dismounted, and he didn't have to wonder whether the user would be able to boot their pc so they could use his software. It was probably the best solution to the problems he had to deal with. On my machines where the bios is new enough to match the hard drive capacity, I can run SpinRite on both the Windows partitions and the Linux partitions. It doesn't care. It works strictly at the sector level and is non destructive. Even to use the badblocks command as you and Jim have suggested on my old PC, I have to shut it down and boot a foreign OS, ie a live Linux CD, in order to run the test. That's exactly the same thing SpinRite is doing. It just happens to be booting freedos rather than Linux.

I may run the non destructive rw test on the old pc using badblocks as you and Jim suggested in other messages. It already passed the long smart test and it says the drive is healthy with no bad sectors. I just have to figure out how much additional time I want to spend on it.

I appreciate the info you've shared.

Sincerely,

Ron


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Ron Frazier
770-205-9422 (O) Leave a message.
linuxdude AT techstarship.com


"mike at trausch.us" <mike at trausch.us> wrote:

On 05/11/2012 01:41 AM, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:
> However, SpinRite runs strictly at the dos / bios level from a bootable CD.

If that is the case, this further discredits the project. The Linux
kernel is more than powerful enough to give you direct access to the
device where you can even issue direct SCSI commands to the thing. For
that matter, you can then do things like reset the drive and continue in
such an event.

Using BIOS, it's anybody's guess as to what can happen. Depends on the
BIOS vendor, version and line.

	--- Mike

-- 
A man who reasons deliberately, manages it better after studying Logic
than he could before, if he is sincere about it and has common sense.
--- Carveth Read, “Logic”

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