GRC | SpinRite 6.0 Experiences and Testimonials

It works.

It works.

Does SpinRite TRULY work?

Please take a moment to read some of the unsolicited feedback we continually receive from SpinRite owners who are, as you can see for yourself, often amazed, stunned, and quite grateful for what SpinRite was able to do for them . . .

Because it is based on solid science and proven engineering, SpinRite routinely performs miracles of data recovery for 1/100th the cost of independent third-party data recovery services. You just run it and SpinRite fixes everything that's wrong. Sometimes it will warn of more serious impending trouble:

04/10/2006 — Compliments from a man of few words . . .

Your product saved my butt this weekend. Thank you so much for your efforts to make an easy, affordable disk recovery system that WORKS.

03/15/2006 — He's going to "make sure everyone at work knows" . . .

I came across Spinrite 6 after one disk where I have maybe 40 installed programs made a grinding noise and continued to work. I tried to clone it with Drive Image 6 and Acronis 9 but I got an error 45, CRC error, and it would not copy the disk.

After researching oodles of utilities on the Internet, I came across your site and decided to buy your product (without much hope). I had an Hitachi 60 GB disk with about 30 GB of data. I had saved all the document files, but it would have taken me weeks to reinstall all the programs I was running, some I might not have the original installation programs which were downloaded from the Internet. In summary, after about an hour of correcting the drive with Spinrite 6, which had bad sectors (I knew that because I had run a HDD utility by the manufacturer) I used Drive Image 6 to make a copy and this time it worked! I removed the old drive and rebooted with the new and all is back to normal.

I cannot thank you enough and I am making sure that everyone at work knows about your product.

03/13/2006 — The subject of his note was: "Testimonial" . . .

Just want to thank you for SpinRite V.6

I purchased the program recently with the intention of running it on all my hardware but hadn't used it yet. Then this weekend I turned on my HP Pavilion ZE4800 and got the "blue screen" every time Windows XP attempted to start. It would display for 2 seconds, then reboot the computer........ not good.

I had already created my SpinRite boot CD, so I booted the laptop to SpinRite and ran data recovery level 2. After about 1 hour (and several data recovery hits), it was complete. My laptop booted fine and ran the entire day without any problems.

The next day I performed a full level 4 maintenance scan. SpinRite found additional problems and repaired them. The final result was no bad sectors, and the drive is working great. A success story!

Thanks again!

03/10/2006 — He says he "just had to write to tell us of his appreciation". . . .

I just had to write to tell you of my appreciation for your latest SpinRite product.

As a listener of your Security Now podcast, I had planned to upgrade my old copy of SpinRite just to show my support of the podcast, but when my boot drive died last night I knew I needed SpinRite 6 for a different reason. Since my old copy didn't support my new hardware, I upgraded then downloaded version 6 on a different machine. I burned a boot cd and popped it in the machine with the failed boot drive. A couple of hours later I am writing this on the machine with the previously failed drive and everything looks great. Many thanks for your continued development of this superior product.

02/20/2006 — He says he "had to write to say thanks" . . .

I had to write to say thanks for the amazing Spinrite.

My hard drive decided to stop working one day and insisted on going into a loop on boot up and although the normal windows options of Safe mode etc were displayed any choice selected resulted in the hard drive starting the loop again. Very frustrating!!

I had known of Spinrite for some time and although I was somewhat skeptical decided I had little to lose and that if it worked to recover at least some of the 20-30Gb of data including some cherished photographs it would be worth it.

Having installed a new hard drive and downloaded Spinrite I copied it onto a floppy and reconnected the defective drive. I let Spinrite do its work overnight and to my total amazement the following morning I rebooted the computer and all the defective drive contents were fully available. Amazing!

I would thoroughly recommend Spinrite to anyone who has hard drive problems - I don't understand how it works or if there are other products around that will do the same thing but what I do know is that Spinrite solved my problems.

02/06/2006 — 250 Gigs of music, videos & photos recovered . . .

Just wanted to say thanks for helping me recover 250 gigs of music/videos/pictures that I had not backed up. I just hit a button and my data was back! Worth every penny, thank you so much!

12/29/2005 — He says "SpinRite is an awesome product" . . .

I just wanted to thank you for such a wonderful product. My mom runs a small convenience store and uses a PC to keep track of her daily receipts. Unfortunately, it recently just quit booting. After moving the hard drive to a new machine, I realized it was the drive itself. Windows could not recognize the drive format. After purchasing SpinRite (I have read about it for years but had never purchased a copy) and creating the boot CD, it quickly resolved the issue and I was able to recover all the data on the drive with zero loss.

Thanks again, SpinRite is an awesome product and definitely made the holidays a little less stressful for all of us!

12/28/2005 — Two dead drives brought back to life . . .

Thank you for everything that you do to entertain, protect, and help us! SpinRite has, thus far, resurrected two of my hard drives once considered dead! I will continue to recommend your programs to all my friends and colleagues.

12/10/2005 — Possibly "the best software purchase" he's ever made?

I just wanted to say a massive Thank You for SpinRite. I purchased it a while back as a "just in case". I used it in anger for the first time yesterday and it recovered the entire system with just a few files damaged which were easily restored from our back-ups. I was anticipating a nasty weekend of rebuilding, but instead I have an extra day that I hadn't banked on. Quite possibly the best software purchase I have ever made.

11/14/2005 — Hurricane Wilma killed his drive . . . then SpinRite revived it

Just had to drop you a line. I lost my hard drive after hurricane Wilma. The power went on and off several times before I could shut down. The big blue screen appeared and windows refused to boot. I contacted Dell and they said the error code said - bad hard drive. I had over 1,500 jpg. files on that drive. Dell offered to send someone over to replace the drive but I didn't want to be held hostage while someone tried to install and reconfigure a new drive, so I bought a new one myself. A 200 gig. SATA to replace the 160 gig that went bad. I installed it and all went fine. But my what about my data? I looked for about two weeks and sorted out my options. Then I found out about spin-rite, It looked like the one. I bought it, downloaded it to a floppy, reinstalled the old drive and booted from the floppy. 1 hour and 3 minutes later, windows booted up and I was able to download all my data. Unbelievable! Worth every dime. Seldom have I been so satisfied with a product, especially one having to do with computers. Gibson rules!!!!!

11/10/2005 — A power outage zapped his external USB drive . . .

I was blessed by having purchased Spinrite 6.0 when an external usb hard drive I was using had its Master File Table zapped by a power outage. (yes, it was connected to a UPS, but the batteries were overdue for replacement). I moved the troubled drive to a desktop pc and ran Spinrite 6.0 against the drive. Spinrite 6.0 recatalogued the drive and I was able to backup to DVD those files which mattered to me. After re-initializing the drive, things are back to normal. Thank you for a product that exceeded my expectations.

11/07/2005 — He remembered SpinRite before he threw it out the window . . .

Thanks! My computer crashed (It was frozen and there was nothing I could do. It was using 100 of the cpu and I could not do anything). And just before I threw it out the window I remembered the SpinRite disc I made. I put it in and pressed 2 and it ran. It not only restored my computer but it fixed a program that had not worked right before. I now think it is worth every penny. You can use this if you want. Thanks.

10/06/2005 — SpinRite truly REPAIRS hard drives . . .

I wanted to take a moment and thank you for your excellent software. My older laptop was having problems with corrupted video drivers. Reinstalling the drivers worked for only a little while. Whenever I rebooted, I was never certain I would get past the Windows XP logo screen. It would go from there to a blank, black backlit screen, and always at the most inopportune times. The problem was bad enough that I set it to hibernate when I closed the lid so I wouldn't have to shut down.

After purchasing Spinrite V6.0 over the weekend, I ran a level 4 scan on the entire hard disk. During the scan it turned up one bad spot on the disk. Since running Spinrite I have shutdown and rebooted the laptop repeatedly without a hitch; no more blank screen of despair.

Thanks again for the excellent software.

10/03/2005 — Everything BUT SpinRite had given up hope . . .

My hard drive recently crashed and even the Maxtor diagnostics simply told me the drive was beyond help, as did many other programs. But NOT Spinrite. After some convincing (the hard drive apparently has trouble spinning up at this point) your software went right to work and restored all my vital info that everything else told me was lost. I was able to move the data to another hard drive with some other software. After so much trouble I just wanted express my appreciation for making this program quick and easy to purchase and use. And since I can keep using it to monitor my hard drives that are still supposed to be working, this program is well worth the price, especially when compared to some of those pricey programs that only work for recovery purposes.

Keep up the great work!

9/26/2005 — He had given up his data for lost . . .

I want to thank you guys. I had given up the data for lost. I thought the hard drive was a goner. But nooooo. Thanks to you. All my data is back. The best. You guys are the best! Thanks and thanks again.

9/23/2005 — eMail Subject: SpinRite saves the day! . . .

Dear Mr. Gibson,

Let me start off by saying, w00t!

*ahem*

I would also like to say thank you. SpinRite has helped me avert a very ugly situation when all other attempted disk recovery methods have failed. In my previous email I mentioned having a mirror array with a missing drive and the "working" drive was ailing. SpinRite has prevented me from having to format and re-install my Domain Controller, which we know is risky business even with good backups.

There was one particularly stubborn sector, which a level 2 scan reported "Completely unrecoverable because the drive could not locate this sector." I subsequently ran a level 4 scan and was a bit disheartened when I received the same message again. However, unlike all my previous attempts, the mirror rebuild was successful! I can now replace the flakey drive and have two solid, reliable disks in my server. You can be assured I will be running a level 4 scan on any new disks that will be used in this server.

9/12/2005 — SpinRite fixes anything it encounters . . .

I want to thank you for SpinRite 6.0. I just used it to fix a bad spot on my disk that XP wouldn't read, preventing me from viewing a video of an R&D project I worked on. After running SpinRite, and noticing it fixed an area, I booted up and found that the video could be viewed again! Thank you very much. I don't know why the big PC vendors (e.g., mine's a Dell) don't put your software on their systems instead of all the other junk they put on them.

9/9/2005 — It took 24 hours, but all important files were recovered . . .

Hey Steve, I wanted to say that your SpinRite 6 software is wonderful. I purchased it a few weeks ago after having problems with a laptop harddrive that crashed. I was able to recover all of the important files off of it after letting SpinRite run for 24 hours. Keep up the good work.

8/18/2005 — They tried everything, but nothing worked, until SpinRite . . .

I want to thank you so very much for Spinrite. We are back in business. I'm not sure how to write an "appraisal" for you, but I can tell you, Level 5 did the job on our ailing, chugging IBM Deskstar 60G IDE drive. It took about 12 hours to refresh the Deskstar drive with Spinrite, with about 3 of those hours appearing to be deep detailed work by Spinrite. I then ran CHKDSK which took several hours. And- success! Every single file was recovered- the registry problems gone, all files fully restored, every single one. The Deskstar drive works like new.

I immediately cloned the Deskstar drive and got the clone running as the new primary drive- although I must say that cleaning up after Norton Ghost was a dreadful, protracted, and messy operation, compared to the operations with Spinrite.

Many, many thanks to you Steve.

8/13/2005 — Don't trash your PC, just get SpinRite . . .

I was about ready to dump my Dell 8300 in the trash and buy another! I kept getting "screen freezes" that required a hard boot by pulling the plug. CHKDSK would hang and not complete it's cycle. Looking on the web, I saw a post about SpinRite. I bought it last night and ran level 4. My computer works fine now!!

Thank you guys! Get the word out!

7/11/2005 — This one we were TOLD to post . . .

Please post my feedback re SpinRite V6 all the way from Northern Ireland.

My sons computer went DOWN BIG TIME would not start up in Windows got in a LOOP Could not get in on Safe Mode or any other way. ALL THAT DATA LOCKED UP and since at University IMPORTANT DATA. Well I tried everything even trying to install windows XP over the Current instalment the computer would not have anything to do with it. I contacted my Brother in Law who is a WHIZ on Computers, he tried everything I did plus a few more tricks, STILL it wouldn't work then he remembered this SpinRite Programme, we went to the web site, I must say we were TOTALLY DUBIOUS OF IT, thought at $89.00 it could be an expensive mistake, well we downloaded the two videos via my computer and watched them, then we noticed the 30 day money back Gtee. Tom and I looked at each other, and concluded worth a chance. Well after Two and a Half hours it had completed its merry way through the Hard Drive. I removed the Floppy and restarted the Computer and Prayed and IT WORKED I COULDN'T BELIEVE IT neither did Tom started up perfectly, AMAZING, my response to $89.00. a SNIP AT THIS PRICE FOR THE PROGRAMME, Thanks "Steve Gibson" a GENIUS.

T.B., Belfast, Northern Ireland

7/02/2005 — Data is usually more precious than its container.

Please excuse my needlessly adding to the bulk of your e-mail but I could not find an address for some "fan mail"!!!!! And I do have the need to burble a bit about how wonderful your product is, for once again "SpinRite 6" bailed me out!!!!

I am something of a dinosaur in that I still use diskettes to store my "word-processing data" and one started "acting up" on me, so I finally had the wit to boot-up in SpinRite and began a "level 2" run. The deeper into the process the more bad sectors it was turning up; all of them were reported to be physically damaged and marked as unusable in the future BUT SpinRite reported that all of the data was recovered and useable!

I don't know how in the world this works (and don't need to, of course) but I surely am grateful that it does! So once again my thanks for having created such a useful product!

Most sincerely.

6/02/2005 — Saving drives and diskettes and making systems run better.

Dear Gibson Research,

SpinRite 6 rescued several diskettes and a hard drive that was about to quit. Unexpected system crashes and 'hanging' of programs is finally over. On another hard drive with a different system performance improved. The diskettes were very old (12 years) and were inaccessible. But after running level 5 (I didn't run a lower level first) they worked fine and displayed the information on them.

Thanks again for this great work.

5/24/2005 — What's a hard drive's data worth?

Last week I had a hard drive that would not boot. It kept repeating the initial process and getting hung. Your software cleaned the disk in about 10 hours. It then booted fine, and once the data was recovered, the disk was replaced. Excellent.

I also have a parallel disk to keep data secure - the F Drive. Your software alerted me to the fact that failure of the F Drive was imminent. In the case of that failure together with the failure of the C Drive, I would have lost all data. The business (Quantity Surveying) would have had to close, as work could not have been maintained. Litigation would probably have followed as clients would have found themselves unsupported by me in their contracts, accounts and cost control. It doesn't bear thinking about.

I am indebted to you.

Many thanks.

5/23/2005 — A software engineer recovers his father's system

I purchased SpinRite 6.0 about a year ago, and have never had cause to use it up until now. However, last week I got a call from my father saying that he couldn't boot into Windows XP. I tried talking him through a few recovery scenarios, mostly using his Windows XP install disk and trying to run chkdsk. This failed to get it going.

Two days ago I went over there and took my copy of Spinrite 6.0 along. I put it in and booted from the diskette. Immediately Spinrite detected an imminent hard disk failure on the data drive (the machine has two hard drives and one is used to store the OS and applications, the other to store data). I proceeded to run SpinRite at level 2 on the failed hard disk (not the data disk).

5 hours later, I removed the Spinrite disk and rebooted the machine. Windows XP magically booted, none the worse for its ordeal.

Spinrite did a fantastic job and I'm very pleased to say that Spinrite did exactly what it claims to do, namely, recover the hard disk beautifully.

Having proven the software to my father, he is now enthusiastically purchasing a copy of his own from your website.

Congratulations on a competent and solid product. This sort of software quality and attention to detail is not often found. I know - I'm a software engineer!

4/12/2005 — "SpinRite saves the day" (Found in an online CNET posting.)

SpinRite is a fantastic product if you need to recover unreadable data from a magnetic drive. I have had occasion to use it 3 times in the last 17 years (the most recent was yesterday on an XP laptop hard drive) and it worked flawlessly each time to recover totally dead drives. Yesterday I used Spinrite 6 on an NTFS partition that couldn't be recovered with Windows XP recovery tools. SpinRite found the bad sectors, repaired the data and my laptop is back to normal. $89 is a cheap price to pay for recovering lost data!

4/11/2005 — His laptop boots Windows again and runs better than ever . . .

I simply wanted to let you know that your SpinRite product saved my bacon. Last night my 2-year-old Gateway 450XL just quit loading windows and I could tell that the hard disk had obvious problems. I purchased and ran SpinRite (at level 2) and by the time I woke up this morning, my laptop was functioning better than it ever has before.

4/02/2005 — "Thank you for a great product!"

Subject: Thank you for a great product!

A week or so ago, I had a drive failure on my laptop. 50 MB or so, a mix of business & personal data. No big deal - I'll just pull my backup data from the server. Except, apparently my backup routine failed some time back. Oh well.

I did some searching, and based on the recommendation of a friend, and the reviews that are cited on your site, I bought your software yesterday morning. At 6 pm last night, I started SpinRite on my failed drive. At 10:30, I rebooted the machine into a functional copy of XP and began pulling my data off of it.

I'm now in the process of rebuilding my backup routines, and burning copies of my completely recovered data. I plan on recommending this product to my team at work, as well.

Thank you,

P.M.L., CISSP CISA CCNA
Security Consultant

3/01/2005 — Received from an "absolutely amazed" SpinRite 6.0 user

Here's a testimonial for you:

I had to fix a PC running XP-Home which repeatedly rebooted without ever giving the opportunity to enter Windows. The obvious solution was to format and reinstall XP. But the PC had several years worth of family photographs and personal docs which would have disappeared.

Having purchased an early version of Spinrite years ago, which served me well, I decided to try Spinrite 6 when I accidentally browsed to your Website last Sunday. I downloaded it to a floppy, booted it in the PC, and two and a half hours later, with no further attention on my part, the PC booted perfectly into WIndows! I was absolutely amazed. I had anticipated a piecemeal 10-hour command-mode dissection of files and complete reinstall of software. Instead I had gotten an almost instant solution without any aftereffects.

Upon checking the final results screens I concluded that one or more files in the boot sector or perhaps the partition table had been corrupted, because the graphic screen showed an Unrecoverable flaw right around the drive's first cluster. Apparently Spinrite had reconstructed the corrupted data.

Thanks for a great product. I shall forever remain a Steve Gibson fan.

3/03/2005 — Received from a US contractor in Iraq

I work for a company stationed in Iraq. Due to OPSEC I am unable to state my exact location. I am here with my company in support of US troops here in Iraq. I have used your product for a number of years until NTFS became the dominant hard drive format for companies I work for. I have always had the best luck with your product when using it on FAT or FAT32 formatted hard drives and I have waited a very long time to find that you now support NTFS and Linux platforms.

Here in the harsh environment we work in; hard drives are the hardest impacted and the information to be retrieved when one fails is often devastating to those needing that information recovered. As you can imagine sending it off to a hard drive recovery company isn't exactly an option here in Iraq. So with much pride and confidence I am purchasing your software with the greatest hope of successful recoveries using your product.

The price you ask for such a well written and useful product is more than agreeable when you understand the vast amount of information that can be retrieved using your product. I am, to say the least, excited about being able to revive hard drives mere moments after purchasing and downloading your product. I ask that if you place these comments on your website that you not provide my name or the company I work for.

12/20/2004 — Received from a satisfied SpinRite 6.0 user

Hi Guys

This program works......my friend came to my house about 4 months ago he had over 800 megs of bad sectors on his hard drive, this was cause by some unknown source. He was asking me how much it would cost him, I mention to him the hard drive is no longer under warranty (1995). He would have to buy a new hard drive. Therefore I mention SpinRite V6.

I made an agreement with him if SpinRite V6 can fix his hard drive problems he will pay me the amount owed for buying SpinRite V6, if SpinRite V6 did not fix his problem I will absorb the cost of SpinRite V6, I read all the past testimonies and knew this would work.

He agreed, so I put SpinRite V6 to work on his hard drive, within a few hours his hard drive had a been repaired and no other errors appeared, in my own words it was SpinRite V6 Certified error free.

He's one happy friend knowing he didn't lose the use of his computer for no more than a few hours.Money and time is what it's all about nowadays and SpinRite V6 came thru for both of us.

Thanks.

11/08/2004 — An appreciative (and appreciated) note from someone who's been around.

Hi Steve --

Well, I have been around a long time and even in the old days -- When we read Computer World at work for most of our information -- your name was always around.

Over the years I have bought a lot of software to solve problems for personal computers and business ones. Of course your name and company always come up and some places you have good press and others you don't. It has been hard to know just what is up with all the things being said. BUT....

About 3 months ago, I bought your new Spinrite 6.0 to solve a continual problem with a desktop's hard drive that kept reporting through the S.M.A.R.T attributes that multiple different Volumes on the desktop were going to fail. Purchasing new drives and copying over the data from the old supposedly failing drives did not help. So before I tossed the motherboards or put a replacement controller in I bought your Spinrite 6.0. I ran it on all the drives and of course it took a long time...and amazingly the S.M.A.R.T warnings went away. Now, to tell you the truth I was a little surprised at this, because I was sure that this problem was a controller problem, but, hey, I'll take a free one and there have never been any data errors. So now on a regular basis over the weekend I run Spinrite 6.0 on our desktop.

Now the real story; this weekend my laptop began making that 'click, click, click' sound and then the blue screen of death dump. Of course my personal laptop is not backed up and I thought to myself I am Beeped -- well you know what!!

Well, I took that nifty little program put it on a floppy, connected a USB floppy drive to Toshiba and ran that Spinrite program -- only in level 2. And things began to hum along and then the 'click, click, click' and that went on for about five or eight minutes and then a 'R' appeared -- which surprised the heck out of me -- and four hours later I was able to access my drive back it up and replace the hard drive in the laptop.

That is when I began to think back on all the vaporwear, the 300mb-do-everything-do-nothing-cost-a-lot-bs-software-utilities that I have bought and wasted my money and here is your little 169K utility that is easy to install, easy to use, that saved the day twice in less than three months in ways that I would not expect nor have been too upset at the product if Spinrite 6 had not worked.

So whatever your detractors say about you, all I can say is in my opinion when it comes to utility software, your software does more than what you say it will do and in the world of utility software, that says so much about you as a developer, a business, and your character as human being. You kick ass!! Thank you again Steve.

Aloha
BCG

12/28/2004 — Even the mother-in-law's Mac is saved. (From another recent SR6 user.)

Hi Guys

My mother-in-law brought me a dead iMac G3 DV, with a 10 gig Quantum Fireball hard drive. The drive was clicking, grinding, and apparently stopping completely. She is a teacher, and keeps a lot of vital information on it.

Knowing nothing about Macs, I removed the drive and placed it in my test box for obsolete equipment (Gateway PI 166 mhz, 128 meg RAM), and activated Spinrite. It took about 4 days of running the program (because of such an old slow computer) and when finished, Spinrite had recovered all the data.

The Quantum went into the freezer overnight, which helps for some reason, and in the morning, I was able to transfer all the files to a new hard drive. New drive back in the Mac and it works fine.

It is fascinating to be able to recover Mac OS 9.22 and associated data on an ancient Windows box, using Spinrite. It is worth every penny, especially in this case, and has also fixed several dead Windows drives. Thanks for such a fine product.

9/13/2004 — SpinRite 6.0 revives hurricane damaged Linux server.

During Hurricane Charley, 2004 season, my home Linux server drive was damaged by a really ugly lurching power failure that caused the UPS to flap. After getting power restored 6 days later, the server would not mount a partition that my wife had just committed many gigabytes (and years) of our families digital photos. On a whim, I visited your site last night and read that SpinRite 6 has been released and that it worked on all kinds of partitions. WOW! It ran all night in mode 2 on both drives in that server (1 60g and 1 80g). When I woke up this morning, I rebooted the server and everything mounted just fine. The partition in question was ReiserFS and attempts to run fsck ran into a failed superblock. Running badblock confirmed that the block number in question was indeed unreadable.

I have owned many versions of SpinRite, starting with Version 1.0, so I'm already familiar with what SpinRite can do, but this new ability to work on ANY type of file system is just fantastic. I'll be telling everyone in my Linux User Group about this one. Many of us have copies of SpinRite that we no longer use because of it's tie to FAT type file systems. It's wonderful to have this fine tool expanded to work on every file system around! Kudos' to you, Steve.

Sure I could have upgraded, but I paid full price. And you deserve every penny!

P.S. Feel free to use this as a personal testimonial.

12/31/2004 — A New Year's Eve SpinRite v6.0 success.

I first purchased Spinrite 5 a few years back when my old Gateway 233 HDD was dying. I didn't have much luck with it then - the drive was beyond help by that point. The same thing again last year when I tried SpinRite on an old HP PC (Windows ME).. I, like some others, initially felt that SpinRite had pushed both drives over the edge.

Last week my brother's WinXP wouldn't boot... he was getting a "..missing hal.dll" error - and any attempts he made to access the Windows\system32 directory to replace the missing file on the HDD would give an error - this was the only directory doing that... so, I figured this would be a job for SpinRite 6.

I let it run over night, popped out the floppy, rebooted, and everything worked fine! My faith has been restored. :-)

Actually, I know now that it is better to use SpinRite early on to detect problems in advance rather than hoping it can work some miracle on a drive that's already got one platter in the grave. :-)

Note from Steve: This person's experience illustrates an important point. SpinRite CAN and often DOES perform miracles (see this page). But there ARE physical limits to what anything can do. SpinRite functions as a fantastic preventative maintenance utility to keep drives from getting to the point of non-recoverability. But modern drives can fail quickly, so you should ALWAYS use SpinRite at the earliest sign of trouble!

Like any truly worthy, fine product, SpinRite is honored to enjoy a large base of loyal fans, supporters, and "true believers" who have used it to "save their bacon" countless times through the years.

At the end of the SpinRite v6.0 development, before we had been able to accumulate the terrific, unsolicited feedback above, we asked the folks in our grc.spinrite.dev newsgroup to share some of their favorite SpinRite data recovery stories. Here are their replies . . .

I'm truly excited to be able to use my beloved SpinRite again. As an aside, 5.0 saved my life about two years ago when a disk crash was imminent -- I was able to save data before the darned thing completely died. Now I am self-employed and working from home. I completely depend upon my system and want -- nay, NEED -- to keep it in tip-top shape.

Just to preface this - I have been a very satisfied user of Spinrite since Version 2, and I still have the lovely green 5.25" floppy of that version safely stored away.

My real job has me administering a small network, wherein Spinrite has literally saved us thousands of dollars on data recovery. I have had to send drives to Drivesavers for recovery and I do not exaggerate the cost of data recovery. Drives that might normally have been taken out of service due to cumulative access failures have been restored to fully functional status by Spinrite, and periodic checkups with SpinRite keep those drives working. Spinrite has also given me plenty of advance notice that a drive is continuing to fail and in serious need of replacement, even if no other symptoms were apparent from the drive's day-to-day performance.

In my spare time, I run a small, volunteer, non-profit computer refurbishment program that accepts donations of used computer equipment, refurbishes it into working condition, and then gives that equipment away to low-income children in the surrounding counties. This program has been providing computers to kids since 1995, and a version of Spinrite has ALWAYS been part of the refurbish process for me. Over the years I have run Spinrite on literally hundreds of systems with more different drive configurations than I can even recall. During that time, I have only seen a single drive that Spinrite refused to run on (don't ask), and have been able to restore function to numerous "failing" hard drives. Most recently, Spinrite 6 allowed me to recover use of a donated Laptop that was stuck in a shutdown sequence loop from which it refused to break. I've no idea how it pulled that particular rabbit out of it's hat, but Spinrite remains, and will always remain, one of the first "miracles" I perform on a system.

Any computer service tech or IT management department that doesn't use Spinrite is shooting themselves in the foot, in my opinion.

Dave H.
Northeast Colorado

[Hi Steve! This is my best story; I've forgotten many more . . . but sometimes one is enough :) :). I tell this in seminars around the world . . . it really was one of those real world "takes a licking but keeps on ticking" situations!!!]

A friend came to me for help -- after a bad fire in his home, the only thing even *potentially* savable was a blackened hard drive. It powered up, but was full of errors. The situation seemed pretty hopeless, but he had no backup and the disk contained important financial data for his church. I'm sure the cheers were heard from miles away when SpinRite restored the drive to a clean bill of health -- ALL errors resolved! We were in awe. THANKS, Steve!

Pete H.
Black Forest, CO

Yes, it's true. The following is a TRUE SpinRite testimonial. The names, events, places and panic are truthful and genuine. No artificial anything added.

About one month ago (April 2004), my girlfriend's computer began exhibiting symptoms that I would call "indigestion". Booting into Windows 2000 Pro was getting to be a "have lunch and check later" affair when it consistently did that annoying drive check during boot up. After about the 20th time this happened, she called on her crack PC support staff (me!) and begged me to stop this from happening. After doing the usual checks (Scandisk, Chkdsk, etc), I began to get this really sinking feeling when during the next boot I got the S.M.A.R.T. "FAILURE" message! Yikes!

I immediately thought "Spinrite"! Popped in the floppy, set it to run at Level 5, said a few prayers and watched. It took over 24 hours to go through the entire drive (9 GB) and at one point it got "stuck" on a set of bad clusters that turned out to be VERY BAD sectors as shown in the Reallocated Sector Count. It was SKY HIGH! What Spinrite did was verify that the rest of the drive was good and to "refresh" those areas that were on the verge of oblivion enough to back them up to a new drive.

Since this was the computer she uses for her business, it was CRITICAL to get this data saved and restored el pronto! Spinrite once again saved the day as it has been doing for me ever since Spinrite 3.1!

Thank you Steve and Spinrite!

Larry G.
Jericho, New York, USA

THANK YOU!

I had a PC with a disc that was, shall we say, somewhat flaky and had been hanging on now for several weeks for the release of SR6! (If it had been a FAT disc it would have been fixed weeks ago!)

I am not sure how much longer the disc would have lasted but I have been getting errors from the system, including during the boot process, saying that the disc should be changed. Hmmmm!

After a very quick and easy purchase and more than 4 hours running SR6 has now finished - and fixed a number of errors! What's more, I don't get the nasty message during boot telling me to change the disc either.

The only thing that was a bit disconcerting was the time it took to download..... I'm on a 1M cable so it was only a few seconds..... then discovering that the file was only 170k..... Thank God I knew what to expect.

Thanks again Steve, that's yet another fixed disc to your credit!

Ian S.
Bracknell, Berks, England

Hi Steve,

I have been following your work and readings for several years and have known of Spinrite. My personal experience in using Spinrite has only been recent and has saved me stress and heartache for my wife. The story goes as follows...

My wife runs an accounting practice and is still on Win98 which is adequate, why change to WinXP when there is no need for it. I always plead for my wife to perform daily backups of clients tax files and lodgment data to a Jaz drive. On occasions she forgets to do this, and on this occasion had not done so for several weeks.

As it happened, her hard disk starting going berserka (hope this is a word) thrashing it's head left right and centre. It would thrash, spin down, spin up and thrash some more. This would continue until it just gave up. Now during this period you would sometimes get to boot Win98 but before you try to copy files off it would thrash some more and give up.

Given that there is potential loss off data, 2 weeks of valuable files and lodgment details. I turned to Spinrite to see what it could do to resurrect the drive to be able to take these files off. I purchased Spinrite 5.0, booted it up, while I was selecting the drive within Spinrite the heads were thrashing some more. Soon as Spinrite kicked in to analyse the hard disk the thrashing stopped and Spinrite completed it's analysis.

After this the hard disk was useable, it would boot up without a problem and seemed to work fine. But I did replace it with a new hard disk.

That $89 purchase saved many hours of resurrecting my wife's PC and the loss of valuable data. Mind I say my wife is thankful and now does a daily backup without fail.

Thanks Steve for a wonderful product.

Joe S.
Cordeaux Heights, Wollongong, Australia

Most people don't purchase SpinRite until their data is at risk. We understand that,
and it's okay, because then they REALLY become believers. But please consider
that SpinRite is the best preventative maintenance that any amount of money can
buy. Using it BEFORE you are desperate keeps you from ever being desperate.

Steve, I posted this on one of your newsgroups last August. It's a true story, and my young'un has learned better:

I can tell you from first-hand experience that the 'dynastat' system is a major butt-saver. I'd used spinrite for years on my machines, as a preventative, without -- as steve says -- really understanding how good the data recovery is. One day, my young child, whilst rollerblading indoors (I know, I know), knocked an operating floor mounted tower on its side. Oops.

Spinrite allowed me to recover every file on the drive. Before I applied spinrite, the machine would not read the drive at all. After spinrite, the drive booted and a few data files were damaged but salvageable. Spinrite told me I could keep on using the drive, if I wanted to, but after transferring my data, I trashed it, anyway. I was fearful of loose oxide flying around inside.

Walter H.
KTWO Radio News

For some time now I've been known to friends as the guy to bring their hard drives to when the drives develop problems. First using SpinRite v5.0, and then later SpinRite v6.0, I can't recall even one single time when the data was not recovered intact by SpinRite . . . even in cases where the drives were making loud and alarming mechanical noises. Many of these friends have subsequently decided to purchase SpinRite, which is a decision I always encourage. SpinRite is an essential tool, designed and written by a true master, and in my experience nothing else even comes close.

Bob T.
Rochester, NY

I work in a health sciences library for a medical school. I often have students (and professors and doctors, even!) come to me with a floppy disk that has a very important file on it (This paper is due today!) and it is the only file that cannot be opened. I clone the disk (just in case) then turn SpinRite loose on it. I've received many tins of baked goods and a few hugs/kisses (don't tell my wife! ;-) ). Invariably they ask me what was the problem; I ask them how long they've had the disk.

"Oh, I've been using this same disk since high school, but it's never failed before." <sigh>.

Al G.
Philadelphia, PA

I went back to visit my old high school because it was alumni reunion day. While I went over to say hi to some teachers, one of the teachers asked me if I could help her out. Apparently, one file on a floppy just wouldn't open or move itself no matter what she did. First, I tried to open it with a hex editor, but the program froze, so I just grabbed a copy of SR6 and had her run it on the disk. She told me it fixed the problem and was able to get the file off of it (it was actually a student's disk, and I'm quite sure he was happy to have his assignment saved from the disk).

Steve Z.
Bensalem, PA

Steve,

I purchased SR5 when it came out and used it for years. But since windows 2000/NTFS now XP/NTFS, I was unable to take advantage of SR abilities. When SR6 came along I was thrilled again, I now have a great NTFS tool. My parents are visiting from Iowa they brought their 4 year old HP - I am tasked to add/remove software from time to time and had uninstalled a piece of software then went to reboot - this is where it starts: The power supply died, so I purchased another supply and powered up - Great it lives

but NO, the XP boot screen comes up and then a blue screen stating "UNRECOVERABLE_BOOT_DEVICE_ERROR", thats when I pulled out my SR6 disk, started SR on level 5 and got some shut eye. The next morning SR told me it repaired a bad sector - good, I rebooted my dad's pc and it started like nothing was ever wrong.

I thank you for the SR product, its small, it's focused and it works.

David D.
Houston, Texas

Let's see here . . . my Spinrite 1.0 (5-1/4" floppy) is here somewhere . . .

Over the last 15 years or so - I have had a few 'close calls' in almost losing a hard drive and even some floppy diskettes that were, at the time, deemed Vital. Spinrite has been able to catch and save every disk, diskette & Zip disk that I have run it on, unless there was an outright hardware failure where the drive would refuse to spin up anymore or the recording media was truly damaged.

I think the most memorable, and the most praise worthy, was a few years ago, we were collecting some long-term (over 600 hours) performance data on a piece of military avionics at work. The data was captured, pre-processed and then spooled out to a huge 450MB drive (like I said - a few years ago). We were within a few hours of completion when we had a power glitch, this time our UPS didn't, and the data collection PC made some buzzing/groaning noises, then tried to reboot. Yes, it tried several times, but a blank CRT is a terrible view.

The data was out there but the directory structure and maybe the FAT was lost. After some minutes of Managerial Hand Wringing and a session of Blamestorming - I had the presence of mind to hop home and get my Spinrite floppy. After running Spinrite on this hard drive (in another host PC) - the blown over sectors were resurrected, we had our data! Praise and honors for me! Because of this event - the company ended up ordering a couple copies of Spinrite 3 to have for the next time. (This couldn't happen again, could it?)

Meanwhile, my goal is to collect the entire set of Spinrite floppies and have them mounted in my office ;-)

Thanks Steve for your great product and your educational website. SR6 works for me!

George C.
Newbury Park, CA

A few years ago, my defragging software refused to process a data drive until its errors were handled. CHKDSK confirmed that there were errors, so I ran SR5. It corrected more than CHKDSK had found, leading me to believe that the disc was rotting under me rather than failing catastrophically as in a head crash. I reran SR5 three times with ever-decreasing numbers of corrected sectors.

When the last pass showed no errors, I backed up the drive and replaced it. No losses at all.

Even if CHKDSK had "fixed" the errors it found, it would have discarded the faulty sectors instead of moving them and surely would not have kept up with the decay process. Until all data were in good sectors, useful backup would have been impossible.

SR2 had saved my data once some years before. I was not surprised at SR5's success - merely grateful for it.

Mike R.

I purchased SpinRite 5 some years ago to run as preventative maintenance on my hard drives. Everything checked out fine and I half forgot about the program as I moved on to digital photography and learning more about computers. A year or so later one hard drive developed a bad cluster which Microsoft Scandisk was unable to fix. I had already been backing up the drive (so I did not lose any data) but the computer eventually refused to boot.

Remembering my copy of SpinRite, I ran it on the drive and it was brought back to life. A second hard drive developed a problem when I was learning how to use partitioning software. Thinking that a simple wipe of the drive would undo my error, I tried that first without success. SpinRite again came to the rescue and the drive was returned to service as a result.

Since I am now using Microsoft Windows XP exclusively and SpinRite 6 works on NTFS formatted drives, I will be using it regularly for maintenance and it will be the *first* thing that comes to mind whenever I experience a hard drive problem. Thanks to GRC for a professional and easy to use product!

Dianne S.
Florida

For routine back up, I use a hard disk via a parallel port connection, as were all the rage before USB was pushed. As time went by, there seemed to be more errors in my safety backup than there were on the operational disk. Something Needed to be Done (tm!).

At this point, I just chanced to come across SpinRite but hesitated: was it really worth the price? A previous drive in the same adapter had developed similar problems within a few months of installation, and had been swapped by the supplier free of charge so why not this one?

It was the presence of confidential commercial information belonging to others on the current back up that made me consider whether the data could be recovered. And if I returned it, and others recovered the data what would they do with it? Couldn't take the risk. Bought SpinRite. Ran it, overnight! It had some work to do! But the errors went, my data was again retrievable. And running it from time to time on the same disk now takes nowhere near as long. The troubles haven't been seen since!

Jeff D.
Buckinghamshire, UK

As a trustee of a local charity supporting people with a physical or sensory disability, and having a little computer knowledge, I am usually the first person called upon when one of the office machines starts playing up.

This happened quite recently when trouble was experienced trying to get E-mails via Outlook Express. Once at the work station it was immediately obvious that there were big problems ie every icon on the desktop when clicked took an age to respond when I asked how long has it been like this was told oh a long time but it works so we were not to bothered <<shudder>><<shudder>>. Being a Windows98SE machine a complete re-install seemed the best way to go.

The hard drive has an 18 Gigabyte capacity and is partitioned (divided up into 5) drive letters. C: being the Windows Drive, D: a dedicated Swap space, E: holding the programmes ie Ms Office 97 etc.,F: holding the My Documents folder and other working documents. finally G: held the Windows cab files Office 97 setup files Modem drivers etc.

Given that formatting the C: drive would not wipe out all stored and not backed up data that was the action taken. After a clean install of Windows 98SE and all applications were reloaded the machine was still exhibiting unpredictable behaviour ie was not as clean and crisp in its response to the mouse or key board, running Scandisk did not have any effect.

At this point I was getting concerned that there was a hardware problem but where?

Right lets try Spinrite and see if there is a hard drive problem. Knowing Spinrite to be good but slowish it was started running on level 4 the monitor switched off and every one went home, with a note left for the operator to switch on the monitor note any messages on Screen remove the floppy disk from the drive and reboot.

I arrived at the office next morning to be greeted with the words what ever you did worked look instant response from clicks on the icons and Outlook Express opens much faster, now how do we back up the important information? That is another story, but reviewing the spinrite log did not show any failures but it definitely did some thing to the hard drive. And most important the important information is still safe.

Rod. (In the UK)

Some years ago I had an overheating drive where file readability was dependent upon temperature, making it unusable. I wasn't aware of the importance of back-ups back then, and there were some very important documents I needed to get at. Spinrite successfully made all data readable at a constant high temperature, and saved the day. Compared to the value of the data, Spinrite was a bargain.

It's now one of my prime preventative maintenance tools.

Jim Crowther
West London, UK.

I own a small business, and backed up my accounting data on a floppy disk. At one point, I needed my backup, but the file would not open. The floppy had only been used once, to save the backup straight out of the box. (Yes, it was stored in a cool, dry location.)

Spinrite recovered the data, and saved me from having to re-enter 5 months of financial data from the paper records. Needless to say, I was very happy.

Wayne P.
Boise, ID

So . . . Does SpinRite TRULY work?

In a word . . . ABSOLUTELY! . . . and it will work for you.

The few samples above describe the successes that these people — like hundreds of thousands of others — have experienced with SpinRite.

You can wait until you're in trouble, and perhaps you'll be luckier than the hundreds of thousands of people who never used SpinRite for preventative maintenance until they were brought to the brink of disaster. But if that day comes, don't forget GRC.COM and SpinRite.

It works.

We'll be here 24/7 to help rescue your possibly precious personal computer data.

OR . . . you can become a SpinRite owner TODAY and head-off that future disaster before it strikes — as tens of thousands of SpinRite's owners do every day. Just occasionally run SpinRite overnight to keep an eye on your drives and prevent them from delivering a nasty surprise at the most inconvenient time. (Is there ever a good time?)

Click the left button to begin the process of upgrading or purchasing your own copy of the world's leading mass storage maintenance and data recovery utility. Or click the right button to answer questions you may have about SpinRite's use and operation . . .

And if, by any chance, you need any more convincing that we know our way around data recovery disasters (or if you just want to read some more REALLY happy and true stories): You may enjoy reading a few of the reactions we received from users of our free FIX-CIH utility which rebuilt their hard drives after they were wiped out by the Chernobyl (CIH) virus.

(Some of these are really fun!)

In any event, thank you for your interest, attention, and consideration.

Gibson Research Corporation is owned and operated by Steve Gibson. The contents
of this page are Copyright (c) 2008 Gibson Research Corporation. SpinRite, ShieldsUP,
NanoProbe, and any other indicated trademarks are registered trademarks of Gibson
Research Corporation, Laguna Hills, CA, USA. GRC's web and customer privacy policy.

Last Edit: Apr 10, 2006 at 08:49 (1,005.32 days ago)

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