Where we go from here

It's time for SpinRite to move away from its birthplace of DOS.

SpinRite v6.1's addition of full IDE/ATA/AHCI PATA/SATA native drivers to SpinRite v6.1 made a huge difference when spinning or solid state mass storage devices can be directly connected to the machine running SpinRite. But v6.1 accesses any USB-connected drives and newer NVMe drives (when possible at all) through the system's BIOS. v6.1 could have added similar drivers for USB and NVMe devices.

But the bigger problem was that UEFI-based PCs, lacking the “CSM” (compatibility support module) required to boot DOS are becoming more prevalent and SpinRite users are discovering that the newest PCs where they wish to run SpinRite will not boot DOS and therefore cannot run SpinRite.

Rather than continuing to invest additional time and energy in adding hardware drivers to a solution that remains tied to DOS, the smarter decision was to get SpinRite v6.1 out the door and into everyone's hands. The next step will be to move SpinRite away from DOS to an operating system that can boot on all Intel-based hardware, old or new.

Windows

One of the things we've learned from watching the release of v6.1 is that a surprising (to us) number of people are using USB to connect their drives to SpinRite machines. Our work creating v6.1's new Windows-based USB boot-prep capability and ValiDrive revealed that with additional low-level work within Windows, it might be possible to deliver all of SpinRite's traditional data recovery, performance recovery and long-term maintenance capabilities to USB-connected and other directly-connected drives (almost certainly excluding Windows own boot drive) from within a “SpinRite for Windows” application. If possible, this would resolve all “booting SpinRite” issues.

RTOS-32

GRC has purchased the complete source code for an very mature and capable real-time operating system that is able to boot on either BIOS or UEFI firmware machines. Developing a SpinRite for this operating system would give us full-performance total access to all of any machine's mass storage devices.

We'll probably do both

Since RTOS-32 implements a large portion of the traditional Windows “Win32” API, any code that is first written for Windows could later be transported to RTOS-32. If it turns out to be possible to run SpinRite under Windows for USB and other drives, that would be so compelling that it would be impossible to pass up. Then moving that solution to an independent operating system would give SpinRite's owners the best of both worlds.

But... we cannot commit to when

It's entirely reasonable for anyone to want to when any of this will be happening and when they can get it. The truth is, we have no idea. There are a couple of other important projects that will come first to create other new products. What we can promise is that work will never stop and that many interesting new things will be available as soon as possible... and that includes exciting new versions of SpinRite as soon as we can get them ready.

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