This page has been obsoleted by SpinRite v6.1
SpinRite 6.1 does
not contain this bug that had been plaguing SpinRite 6.0. This page has been left in place until SpinRite 6.1's documentation is ready. All SpinRite 6.0 owners should
take advantage of their free upgrade to v6.1.
Summary:
SpinRite v6.0 has always contained a bug which could – and likely would – occur when SpinRite's DynaStat system engages to recover and repair a sector on any drive larger than ~549 gigabytes. The result of the bug occurring would be that SpinRite would halt and display a “Division Overflow Error” notice like this:
Although no user data would be endangered by this, SpinRite would typically be unable to recover and repair that troubled sector.
Since this problem was discovered very close to the end of the development of v6.0's free upgrade replacement, v6.1, an almost completely rewritten new version of SpinRite containing no such bug, we're publishing an interim SpinRite 6.0 patch utility which removes this bug from v6.0:
File stats for: MDFYSR60 | |
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Last Updated: Size: 2k |
May 20, 2023 at 11:10 (533.85 days ago) |
Downloads/day: 2 Total downloads: 3,554 |
Current Rank: 36 Historical Rank: 40 |
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What to do:
Download the small 1,826 byte
MDFYSR60.ZIP (MoDiFY SpinRite 6.0) file using the link above. The ZIP contains three files: README.TXT, MDFYSR60.COM and MDFYSR60.SYS. Follow the instructions in the README.TXT to add
one of the patch utility files to your existing SpinRite v6.0 bootable media, and SpinRite will automatically be patched whenever it is run from that updated bootable media.
Note that this does
NOT modify the SpinRite executable program itself since it is a hybrid Windows/DOS program containing anti-viral modification self-checking. So, the "MDFYSR60" utilities patch SpinRite after it is running and has passed its anti-viral self tests.
Background:
While I (Steve Gibson) was deeply focused upon getting SpinRite's forthcoming major v6.1 release finished, a talented coder (Paul Farrer) who was hanging out in GRC's spinrite.dev newsgroup where we were all working, became curious about an occasionally occurring and longstanding error that SpinRite v6.0 sometimes reported. So, Paul reverse-engineered the region of SpinRite's code surrounding that error and saw that when SpinRite was being run on drives larger than around 549 gigabytes, the engagement of SpinRite's DynaStat data recovery system could cause one of SpinRite's division operations to overflow. Paul theorized what was going on, which I confirmed by providing him with the relevant piece of SpinRite v6.0's old (from 2004) source code. So, Paul took it upon himself to create these two tiny patch utilities and their accompanying README.TXT instruction file. I reviewed his source code, which was immaculate, and he produced the v1.0 utilities which are contained in this MDFYSR60.ZIP file.
Thanks, Paul!
My goal is to get SpinRite v6.1 finished and published as soon as possible so that we won't need these patches for long. But until we have v6.1, patching SpinRite in this way is a workable interim solution!