GRC | SpinRite 6.0 Experiences and Testimonials

NOW SpinRite 6.1 – Fast and useful for spinning and solid state mass storage!

Since 1988.

It Works.

Additional SpinRite Testimonials
(for the truly skeptical!)

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:

11/12/2012 — Here's another SSD-repair story that shows your SpinRite investment will be useful for many years to come...

Subject: Spinrite Heals Stupidity!

Hi Steve and team!

After several years of using Spinrite for protective maintenance (without incident) it's now my turn to send in a “Spinrite saved the day” story.

I just bought my girlfriend a new Lenovo laptop, and yesterday I spent the morning setting it up for her. I had bought a 256GB mSATA SSD drive so that the laptop would have both the SSD for speed plus the large spinning hard drive for lots of data storage, so I had to install the mSATA and clone the system from the hard drive to the mSATA. Unfortunately, Crucial forgot to pack the teeny tiny little screw that holds the mSATA in place by its top left corner, and after searching all my drawers I found I didn't have one in the house. So I thought, it's nicely seated in the slot, all I need to is tape it into place with the sticky tape from the two little antenna cables and position them so that the cover exerts a little pressure on the SSD drive to keep it in place. Not smart. In fact, very dumb, because as it turns out the screw in the corner provides the electrical ground connection for the SSD.

Everything seemed to install fine, but the first time my girlfriend moved the computer while it was running everything froze. The movement had been enough to interrupt the tenuous ground connection of my jury-rigged installation, and on booting into the BIOS the mSATA SSD drive was no longer visible AT ALL. I realized immediately what had happened, and if I could have, I would have kicked myself. I was afraid that the drive and everything on it might be completely hosed.

Luckily, I'm also a Security Now podcast listener every week from the very start, so I already knew from all the other people who have used SpinRite on SSD's that it's possible to repair SSDs with Spinrite running on level 2. I found a screw, reseated and firmly screwed the drive into place and managed to make it visible again. Half an hour later, Spinrite had repaired everything on level 2 and the computer was as good as new again.

So, as you see, Spinrite can even heal the results of gross stupidity!

Tim Green (Originally British but located in Cologne, Germany)

06/14/2012 — SpinRite is seeing MANY successes, like this one, with NON-SPINNING solid-state (thumb) drives!

Hi, Steve,

I would like to share another SpinRite testimonial with you.

I recently took a 7,000 mile motorcycle trip from North Carolina to visit Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. During the trip, I was taking several hundred photos per day. Some were JPEGs taken with a point-and-shoot camera while on the move and others were RAW plus JPEGs from my Canon DSLR. Each evening, I was copying my camera cards to both my netbook (equipped with a 96 Gb SSD drive) and to a 32 Gb USB thumb drive, since I was quickly filling up my camera cards. Unfortunately, I soon ran out of space on both the netbook and my largest USB thumb drive. To conserve space (since the SSD was almost full), I began using only the USB thumb drive.

After returning home, when I went to import the USB thumb drive photos into Adobe Lightroom, I discovered that three folders (three days' worth of photos) were corrupted and unrecoverable. Remembering that you and Leo had previously discussed a testimonial during a previous Security Now podcast, where someone used SpinRite to recover some flash media, I broke out my copy of Spinrite (which I had previously purchased to pre-test drives for my Windows Home Server). I proceeded to check the USB thumb drive. After completing the scan, to my amazement, I found it had recovered my photos in the corrupted folders. I had some recovery messages about not being able to relocate some files since they were marked System and Hidden, but it had worked!

Like many others, I want to thank you for providing us this outstanding product. Also, a huge thank you for the time and effort you put into the weekly Security Now podcasts with Leo Laporte.

Bill Murray
Wilmington, NC

05/27/2012 — SpinRite "Consultant", "Site" & "Corporate" licenses are available for MASS maintenance & recovery.

From: "Christian Alexandrov"
Subject: When earthquake strikes, SpinRite strikes back!
Date: Sun, 27 May 2012 20:37:07 -0000
Location: Sofia City, Bulgaria

Hello Steve, I want to share a recent spinrite story. A few days ago, earthquake struck our country. Earthquake's magnitude was 5.8 on Richter scale. Bulgaria is in seismological calm area, and such earthquakes are rare. The last earthquake equal to this one was 167 years ago.

The earthquake, created a lot of work for me, and for spinrite. I go all over Sofia City, to help to revive hard disks, that suffered damage caused by the earthquake. Within the entire range I maintain, only 4 PC's were not damaged at all, regardless of the fact the PC's were working during the earthquake.

When the initial quake hit us, it was 5.8 on Richter scale, my own Lenovo ThinkCentre M58P PC, and my dentist's three Lenovo ThinkCentre M57 PC's were working intensively with their hard drives, yet they remained in PERFECT condition. This is the moment, when my dentist, could not believe his eyes. All of his computers, the three Lenovo ThinkCentre M57 PC's were doing late night autonomous scheduled disk defragmentation, when the earthquake struck. Defrag completed successfully and all diagnostics and file and data verification passed without one single error. My own Lenovo ThinkCentre M58P was doing off-line anti-malware scan. My PC passed as good as my dentist's PC's.

However on many places I had to go with spinrite as my tool of choice. A lot of hard drives, were damaged. Spinrite gave a lot of drives that special care they needed to make them good for work again. Some people called me to try and fix their hard drives before they ask for help from PC Repair services, others after.

Of all the range of PC's I maintain, I was the only one who used spinrite and brought over 180 damaged hard drives back to life, and it was a wide variety of hard drives, from 20 GB UATA 33, to 1 TB SATA 3 drives that were saved and brought back to life.

Needless to say there were a lot of U and R red squares on all drives on the first Level 4 scan and a lot of "B" icons on Second level level 4 scan, where the U and R icons were before. And also needless to say what large number of files were saved, and a large number of systems now work fine.

Suddenly I became a PC Hero for saving PC's and bringing hard disks back to life, and saving files, OS's. Work here is still in progress many drives still to fix, and many are taken care of, by spinrite. I do somewhere between 10 and 15 drives at a time, and many computers have 2 or 3 physical hard drives, in them.

Steve, once again, thank you for your great piece of software, a happy Spinrite user.

05/05/2012 — Original Link (via Twitter)

@sggrc - Spinrite brought my server back to life. Now to image it and get a new Hard Drive.

Obando Computing
@ObandoComputing

04/26/2012 — Computers act oddly when their hard drives are unhappy . . .

From: "Sam Fineberg"
Subject: SpinRite helped fix slow computers
Location: Palo Alto, CA

Two of the computers in our household, my son and wife's, were running really slow. My son's computer was even overheating and shutting off occasionally (primarily when he played Minecraft).

The computers weren't that old, so I was contemplating re-imaging them. In preparation for that, I ran a fresh backup on my son's computer and decided to run spinrite on the drive. As I was running spinrite I noticed the drive got very hot, and there were millions of seek and ecc correctable errors. (It's great that SpinRite shows SMART status while it's running!) Running on a similar computer that wasn't slow, there were very few seek errors and the drive stayed much cooler. So, I did an image copy of his drive to a new one, installed it, and the new drive is working great (faster and no overheating issues). After seeing that, I ran spinrite on my wife's computer. It also had millions of seek errors. Once again, I replaced the drive, and it solved that computer's problems too. So, in this case spinrite wasn't needed to fix a problem, but it led me straight to the right solution.

GRC Observation: This is a great example of SpinRite's use for preventative maintenance. Those drives were not happy and would have eventually failed. But by seeing the early pre-failure evidence of drives that were struggling to keep running, this asture user was able to “schedule” their replacement and avoid any chance of data loss.

04/16/2012 — If it “spins” SpinRite can likely fix it!

From: Ben Stool
Subject: It works great on Tivos

Just a note to tell you that SpinRite works great on Tivos! I read about it on your website and heard Steve mention it on Security Now. Our eight year old DirectTV Tivos were starting to act funny, so I pulled both 80 gigabyte Western Digital drives from them, connected them one at a time to a Windows XP SP3 desktop, and ran SpinRite at level 5. Interestingly, both drives reported no errors. However, when I put them back in the Tivos (after blowing an embarrassing amount of dust out of them) the Tivos are back to normal! These are first generation DirectTV Tivos, but we like them and do not want to pay the high premium to go to the new HD DirectTV Tivos that were recently released. SpinRite has let us keep our old friends going.

Ben Stool Dallas, Texas

GRC Observation: As Steve explains during the “What It Does” video explanation, running SpinRite on a drive SHOWS THE DRIVE problems that it has, and allows the drive to fix them itself. In such situations, SpinRite may not report any “recovery” . . . but the drive's troubles will have been cured.

04/05/2012 — Original Link (via Twitter)

@SGgrc: Lovin' SpinRite. Just saved my daughters homework on her failed drive. She's very happy too!

Brian Semingson
@bsemingson

04/02/2012 — Here's a user who actually appears to consider SpinRite's recoveries rather routine!

From: Todd W. Bertels
Subject: Several SpinRite Success Stories

Steve,

Good morning. I would like to share with you some of my successes with your Spinrite app. After listening, every week, to you and Leo for the past year I have decided to share some of these with you.

I have used spin rite on several laptop, desktop, and server hard drives and found that as long as the system recognizes the drive and there are no scraping sounds coming from the drive, it will most likely work!

Most of these are unremarkable, with the exception of two:

1. My server hard drive failed approximately three weeks after I installed a network attached security camera. The camera was configured to push a still image to the server via FTP once a second and overwrite the file existing file. This images are the same size, so it wore a "pot hole" in the drive and the drive failed completely. After running Spinrite, everything came back, except for the one camera image file. Truly amazing!

2. My wife handed me her iPod mini when we were at the gym. It was very sluggish and would hang for three and four minutes at a time before playing again for a few more minutes. We tried syncing it with the computer but that would fail after a few attempts. It had failed hard drive written all over it. I dissected the little gadget and removed the Hitachi micro drive, went to Fry's and got an CF/IDE adapter and ran it against Spinrite. After 45 minutes, the drive was running good as new!

Steve, your product is truly amazing! I have tried many other data recovery products and services over the years and they just don't work. Usually, you get back just enough data to make you kick yourself for not have better backups.

Cheers,
Todd Bertels

04/05/2012 — SpinRite can fix Apple products if you can briefly connect the drive to a PC

From: "Wm. Lorman"
Subject: A classic SpinRite story with an iMac twist.

Hi Steve,

I'm a long time follower of your work and customer since 2006. I just had a scenario I thought you and Mac users would appreciate.

One of my customer's iMacs would not boot and I could not get it back with two well known Mac tools that reported hardware problems. This happened when the customer forgot to configure the new disk they attached for Time Machine so they were 2 weeks since a backup.

I took the Mac to the Apple Store for a warranty claim and the “Genius” gave me a not so nice response when I asked for the bad drive back. He said if the Mac apps I used didn't work nothing would. I said I want to try SpinRite. He never heard of it and said there is no way a PC product could work on an Apple part or recover an Apple system.

I put the drive in a PC, booted SpinRite and I'm guessing you know what happened from there. SpinRite mode 2 got the drive back. I mounted it in an external enclosure and the Mac's Migration Assistant program got the user's whole world right where it was before the crash.

The user was very pleased to become one of your customers and will claims they will never forget to configure Time Machine again.

Sincerely,
Wm. Lorman

03/30/2012 — A frequent SpinRite using corporation went for a site license. (Thanks!)

From: Gregg Dille
Subject: Process control site license/SpinRite

Steve, Just wanted to let you know...I work at a major chemical plant/refinery. (Check your recent purchases of 4 copies to match it up). We bought a single copy of Spinrite a while back, and have been using it quite successfully in our process control environment. Shortly after purchase, I sent a note to our group stating that we should acquire a site license, but the powers that be did not take me seriously. I have tried to advocate the use of Spinrite out here whenever I felt the situation warranted it, as we have some nodes that are really old and there is no plan to replace them. During this year's software license “true-up”, I brought it up again and others have since realized the value of Spinrite...so, we just made the effort to purchase 4 copies so that we would have a site license.

Thanks for all that you do.

A Note about Site Licenses: A single SpinRite license entitles end-users to use SpinRite forever on all of their own personally owned mass storage devices. (Remember, SpinRite also recovers and maintains solid-state thumb and SSD drives!) We ask corporations to own four SpinRite licenses — for a “site license” — which entitles them to run SpinRite on all machines at any one site. Additionally, a “corporate license” of ten SpinRite licenses entitles a corporation to run SpinRite on any/all drives at multiple sites — forever. (More about Site Licenses.)

03/14/2012 — A nice recovery story . . . and a lesson about periodic maintenance . . .

From: Ken Harthun
Subject: SpinRite Saves Student's Laptop
Location: Fort Wright, Kentucky

Hi Steve,

I first used SpinRite in 1999 (version 5.0) to recover a floppy disk that had been corrupted. Since that day, I have insisted that wherever I worked, the IT Department agree to make SpinRite available to me should the need arise. And in my private service world, I always insist that if SpinRite recovers the drive, my client purchase a copy. Needless to say, there have been a few sales as a result!

I have my own copy, of course and last summer I insisted that my new employer, Antonelli College, where I am the Network Administrator, purchase a site license. Well, that's a good thing because last week it saved a student's laptop and all of her Interior Design course work:

Windows was throwing all kinds of errors, the wireless wouldn't connect; she gave me a list of seemingly random errors that didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense, but they pointed toward a hard drive failure. I was about to attempt to back up the data and restore the system when it just completely locked up and I had to force shutdown with the power button. On restart, it just hung at the "Starting Windows" screen and would go no further. I could hear the drive thrashing about. Not good.

Enter SpinRite. I booted up from my thumb drive and ran it at level 2. After a couple of hours, SpinRite reported that it was finished, though no errors or bad sectors were found. On reboot, the system came right up, faster than ever, connected to the wireless and immediately began downloading updates. I completed the updates, ran a few tests and pronounced the patient healthy.

Needless to say, the student was ecstatic and thanks to SpinRite, I did my part to provide a "Superior student experience" (part of our vision statement).

Steve, SpinRite is absolutely the best hard drive maintenance and recovery utility on the planet and maybe in the universe! It's worth 10 times the price you charge for it.

Thanks for all you do.
Ken Harthun

P.S. I've never had a hard drive failure and I attribute that to my using SpinRite on my own systems on a regular basis.

03/10/2012 — SpinRite fixes what's wrong, and prevents trouble from occurring.

From: AL
Subject: SpinRite allows external hard drive to be imaged
Location: UK

Hi Steve, this is just my simple SpinRite story. I purchased it so that if anything goes wrong, then I'd have it to save me. I have experienced the gut wrenching feeling of having a drive which is broken, and at least with SpinRite nearby I can feel calm that it can often fix the situation.

I like using MS flight simulator to fly different planes and I have it installed on an external USB iomega hard drive. After a few minutes of playing the drive becomes pretty hot and I know that heat is not too good for a drive, nevertheless it seemed to keep working many times so I thought that probably the heat may not be so bad. I don't know what the max temp is ok to run drives so that they have a long life.

Then one day I thought that I should make a backup image of my flightsim drive in case it failed. I used Acronis TI to do this, but it told me it could not make the backup because there was a problem with the drive. I guessed that it might be damaged sectors. I ran SpinRite over it and it fixed one sector and then the drive worked completely again.

I tried using a fan blowing air over the external drive while I play the sim and it seems to keep it really cool. Maybe that will give it a longer life.

Thanks very much for your great product Steve.

02/08/2012 — Data recovery service companies charge hundreds to thousands of dollars. SpinRite is a LOT less expensive!

From: "Andrew"
Subject: SpinRite made the wife cry
Location: Las Vegas

Hi Steve: To get right to it, I have had a hard drive that apparently died on me about six years ago. Multiple attempts were made to recover the data as it had three years of family photos including one of my sons' births and two years of his infancy. The only other option I felt I had was to send the drive off and pay a large sum to have the data recovered. I figured maybe in the future I could do this as money was short. I've been a listener for about a year now and figured what the heck, lets try it. So I purchased SpinRite and began the recovery process. The scan ran for approximately TWO weeks (the drive was in really bad shape!). I assumed “its probably not going to work”. When the scan finally finished I connected it as a secondary drive to my PC, the drive appeared and all the data was now accessible!!! I immediately copied over all the data. I put together a slideshow of our precious photos and ran it, when my wife had passed by the computer and realized what had happened, the biggest smile and streaming tears came to her face. Thank you so much for saving us thousands of dollars and making a very memorable moment in our lives.

Buy it once, use it forever! Not only can SpinRite save hundreds to thousands of dollars when it allows YOU to do the job of a commercial data recovery service. But that's only the start of the use you'll be able to put SpinRite to . . . since it will be yours forever!

02/05/2012 — A “generic” data recovery thanks to SpinRite

From: Craig Thompson
Subject: SpinRite 6 saves client's files - again!

I've been using SpinRite for several versions now, and have managed to recover files from seemingly dead drives in the past, but this weekend's experience was, by far, the best. I'm a small, one-man computer biz, so quality, affordable utilities are a must for me and SpinRite has paid for itself over and over (and over) again.

A client dropped off an external HD that had died. She was crazed as she stored (instead of backing up) numerous important files to this drive. Losing it all would have been devastating. After trying a number of other quick-fixes, including a relatively simple Level 2 SpinRite scan, I finally opted as a last resort to turn it up to an 18-hour Level 3 scan. After running all day and night, I reconnected the drive to my system and voila! all of the folders and files suddenly reappeared!

I'm copying off now to return her files to her. I am ecstatic that I was able to recover this data for her, and she's ecstatic that she didn't lose everything! All due to the continually outstanding utility SpinRite. While the cost of this app may seem a little steep for small-time people like me, it is well worth the investment (and my clients couldn't agree more, given the results!).

Thanks very much Steve, and everyone else at GRC for such an outstanding tool!

Very sincerely yours,

Craig Thompson
CDT Computer Services

02/05/2012 — People who really know SpinRite aren't even surprised when it works . . .

Subject: You saved an artist's life/SpinRite Success

Hi Steve,

I'm an avid listener of "Security Now!", So when my younger brother Joe called, saying that his hard drive had carked it, I knew exactly where to send him.

He graduated last year and has been really motivated to get stuck into his artwork to kick off his career. His dead drive had potentially lost him years of work in progress, which would be his ticket to getting his career underway. But now that was all threatened.

He purchased, downloaded and ran SpinRite. But he had trouble getting it to his computer which wouldn't boot from a USB and didn't have a floppy drive. And the computer he downloaded it to also didn't have a CD burner! So he borrowed a USB thumb drive from a friend, copied SpinRite to it, took it to his friend's place to burn a boot CD there.

I actually wasn't surprised when he told me it worked! He's now backing up all his precious artwork to DVD and getting on with his new career.

Thank you for saving an artist's life work. Thank you for all your work on this wonderful product and for actually promoting it on your podcast.

Cheers,
Carl & Joe (Melbourne, Australia)

02/05/2012 — Sometimes what you WANT is to destroy all your data . . . securely!

From: Nick Bowen
Subject: SpinRite allowed me to wipe my data
Location: Walnut Creek, CA

A short time ago a friend brought me his computer for me to run DBAN on prior to him getting rid of it. It was an old Win 98 machine and DBAN would not run because the HD would just grind. I had purchased SpinRite a couple of years ago and hadn't used it yet, but I thought this would be a great opportunity. I ran it on level 2 and it fixed the issue. This allowed me to securely wipe the data before it was given away. Thanks for the Podcast and great product. ...Nick

01/03/2012 — He says “we're great”, but that's only because SpinRite is.

From: David Goldenberg
Subject: SpinRite testimonal

Hi Steve (and friends)

I've been a happy owner of spinrite for a few years now, it s my secret weapon in the technology trenches. I am the family tech guy, I help out at my kids school, and have my own part time business fixing PC's, training and networking. Spinrite is always within reach, and never lets me down.

Last week I had been preparing a laptop for a presentation for my ARES Amateur Radio group, I volunteered to get a new program, NBEMS (Narrow Band Emergency Message Software) running that sends text messages and email type communications over the radio. After several days, I had everything working great, and spent several hours getting screenshots for the PowerPoint I was to prepare.

One morning I went to start up the laptop, as I was getting together with another HAM to go over what I had and to get his machine working, I started up my laptop and got the dreaded BSOD and an un-mountable boot volume. I did not break a sweat, or even worry, as I knew from experience that Spinrite would save the day, and needless to say, two hours later the drive scanned and several sectors were repaired, the laptop booted and everything I needed was ready to go!

You're great! THANKS!

David Goldenberg
KJ6MCQ

12/15/2011 — eMail Subject: “Another SpinRite testimonial”

Hey Steve:

I m a listener of Security Now since year 1 and a SpinRite owner. A few days ago, one of the residents in our training program asked how he could get help with his Dell laptop as our IT department doesn't support machines they don't own.

The story is classic: After a power outage his laptop would not boot into Windows. It would blue screen, reboot, rinse and repeat.

Without hesitation, I told him about SpinRite. I lent him my trusty SpinRite CD (told him he'd have to purchase SpinRite if it did fix his machine). I told him he had to be patient and let the program do its work. He fired up SpinRite and went to bed. When he woke up in the morning, he was good to go. Just like that.

SpinRite is a great product. Another drive saved. Another happy customer. Thanks for all that you do with GRC and thanks for all the great podcasts that you've done with Leo on the TWIT network.

Bob McKinstry
St. Louis, MO

12/12/2011 — eMail Subject: “SpinRite, once again”

Steve,

I manage a help desk where we see our share of failed hard drives. Most data is backed up so I'm not usually too concerned with bringing a dead hard drive back to life. But the other day a user came to us because her laptop would no longer boot. We didn't have a spare laptop drive on hand so I had my tech quickly run SpinRite so that, hopefully, she could keep working until we could get another drive and re-stage her laptop. SpinRite worked like a charm and she was able to work the rest of the day without a problem.

SpinRite, as always, came through in a pinch.

Rob
Las Cruces NM

12/01/2011 — A SpinRite v5 owner who upgraded to v6... then needed it!

I have been a SPINRITE customer since version 5 (for more than ten years). I have been using it occasionally but, have had no real problems with my hard drives. I was glad to have the product but, until last night I couldn't actually say it worked as I had not encountered any drive problems. I have recommended the product to others based on my satisfaction with your freeware tools. That has now changed.

For the past week or two, I have been noticing that when starting windows, it would almost boot up but, would not display the list of users to select. Sometimes I would see the users but, would be unable to mouse over them to enter the password. It got to the point that I would sometimes have to boot 3 or 4 times to get a good boot. I was thinking A windows re install was going to be required.

knowing how long that would take just to do the install let alone to re install my favorite applications, I thought I'd run SPINRITE just in case the problem was not corrupted files but rather an inability to read the data. I ran SPINRITE on my boot and C drive partitions over night. Since then I have had no further reboot issues.

I can now recommend the program to others with the full knowledge that it really does work and that it saved me many hours of tedious windows install blues.

Good job.
PPS.

11/27/2011 — eMail Subject: “SpinRite saves movie night”

Hi Steve, and the support team,

Sunday Night is movie night for us, however the disk drive in our NAS box started going awol. So i took it out and connected to a pc and ran my copy of spinrite, first use since i ordered it back in 2010. Anyway, at about 16% I got a Divide Overflow error and a red screen. This being Sunday we thought that was it, but no! An email to GRC support was returned in minutes(!) and change a setting in the BIOS, as Greg recommended, completely cured the problem. Within the hour SpinRite had completed it's magic and Movie night was back on. Of course, the drive then perfectly.

Thanks Steve for the great software, and can you past my thanks to Greg McIntyre from your support team.

Paul Smith

11/12/2011 — SpinRite fixes a floppy . . .

Hi Steve and staff,

Spinrite just saved me...I have an old DOS application which for years I've been running off my hard drive, I only need to use it occasionally, and when I went to use it today I discovered that I had accidentally deleted it, probably in my recent clean out of files I (supposedly) didn't need.

So I whipped out the floppy disk which has the application and related files on it, I went to copy it to the hard drive and nearly had a heart attack when it wouldn't copy...Windows couldn't read the main executable.

I took this as an opportunity to do something I've been meaning to do for a while, buy Spinrite. So I bought spinrite and let it loose on this floppy disk, it spent a few minutes working on it, running Dynastat on it in various places. When I got back in to Windows I was able to copy the disk to the hard drive.

I don't think it is possible to get a replacement copy of this DOS application that I'm using these days, so the $89 I spent on Spinrite bought me enough time to get the files off the disk, and saved me an awful lot of trouble.

Thanks Steve...Spinrite is fantastic!

Regards,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
Canberra

10/31/2011 — eMail Subject: “SpinRite - Does it again!”

Steve,

Slightly over two weeks ago, a college professor and coworker of mine explained that his home computer would not boot up. With an exam coming up soon it was very important to him that the content of the hard drive be recovered since this is where the exam materials were. I took a look at the machine and found that immediately after POST the screen would say no boot disk was found. Not good.

I thought this was a job for SpinRite. I put SpinRite on a CD and rebooted the machine. I selected level 2 and let it run - that was on October 6th. Well, on Oct 20th it finished. It ran for approximately 342 hours. There was one recovered sector and seven un-recovered. The CD was removed and the computer was rebooted. Amazingly, the machine booted all the way into Windows and the exam materials could be used again. I was astonished. No, not that it worked. But, because I thought after 14 days that the hard drive was going to have so many bad areas that it would likely not boot and much would be lost anyway. That wasn't the case at all.

It has been my experience with SpinRite that it usually only takes a couple hours to work its wonders, but this effort shows that patience pays off. Many thanks to you for providing such a top-notch program.

Jeff Leckemby
Hampton, Virginia

11/12/2011 — eMail Subject: “I pulled the trigger”

Hi Steve,

I have been hearing the testimonials and mentions of SpinRite for a few years now on Security Now. I thought it sounded nice for those without any options, but I can do a bit of data recovery if I need it, plus I have backups of all important data. So it is not for me. Plus, I thought, how can a format/re-zero not solve any problem?

Well, I recently had a disk in our MythTV media machine that started acting up. It was a disk in the recording pool of disks, so some of our recordings (ie girlfriend's) were on it. Mounting the disk separately was showing that it was empty. Not the end of the world (well maybe for me, but not for anyone else).

So I did a manufacture's check on the disk and it came up fine. I did some other little things and the disk continued to check out fine. Still no data upon mounting it.

Skeptical, I talked a friend out of loaning me his copy of SpinRite, with the promise (to him and myself) that if it did anything I would buy it ... but also being pretty sure it probably wouldn't.

Running at level 4 saw it seemingly stuck at 41% on a spare test Pentium 4. So I changed out the motherboard/CPU etc and resumed from there. A day later we are done and we have all our data accessible!

So there Steve, have my $89 (I just purchased). Well worth it for SpinRite AND all the other information you provide me on the Podcast.

Keep up the good work.

David Ward
Sydney, NSW

11/02/2011 — From “Nerds On Site” Organization

I have my own copy of Spinrite that I've been using on clients machines, and have on occasion suggested it to clients and other nerds. It's a nice tool to have along. I've turned non-booting pc's into booting ones, and in one case a workstation on a domain with a bad sector in the users local profile which caused them to instead log in in a temporary new profile each log in. Spinrite read and restored the data, and in a few minutes they were able to log back into their profile, and could finish up while I sourced a replacement drive and cloned then cloned it.

10/05/2011 — eMail Subject: “Success Story”

Wife lost her Android 'phone SD data, and I simply plugged it into laptop, ran Spinrite 6.0 and it was all back. Another unexpected Spinrite miracle when the estimate for "professional" recovery was > $800.

Good investment for a retired UNIX guy!
Happy wife, happy life. Thanks!
Sam Cannon

10/03/2011 — eMail Subject: “Spinrite saves the saw mill!”

Steve, I'm new to a lumber company with lots of automation in the saw mills. This morning we were getting started on day 2 of a software fix on site (where there is a TON of vibration -- it's a hard drive's worst nightmare) and the lead programmer's laptop was doing the "boot almost to windows then bluescreen" dance.

Well I've been a Security Now listener since episode 100 and a spinrite owner for nearly as long. I knew what to do. I OpenVPN'd to my home computer to get my ISO (which I built on top of MS-DOS instead of FreeDos) and burned a CD. I booted Spinrite into level 2 and let her rip. At about 5% I saw the progress stop and dynastat kick into gear. After one 'R' it sped right up again. Figuring the odds were good that the problem was fixed, I cancelled out, crossed my fingers and booted. Windows came up just fine and we were able to copy off the source code and were right back in business. I'll be talking with my boss about site licenses later today.

Thanks Steve for a great product, and the best netcast out there. You saved us a lot of time and made me look great at a very good price. Plus I'll get home to my wife and kids sooner--did I mention this mill is a 12-hour drive from my house? Keep up the good work (and hurry up with Cryptolink!).

- Mark Ping in Chico, California

09/28/2011 — eMail Subject: “SpinRite saves me from the IT dept”

Steve and Leo,

I am a long time listener of Security Now and have even sent in a few questions or comments over the years. I purchased a copy of SpinRite a few years ago as a way to support the podcast never thinking I would need it (I have a home server and offsite backup). However a few weeks ago I had a situation that proved me wrong. I use my personal laptop at home to access our corporate VPN. Our corporate IT dept implemented a new policy that any PC accessing our corporate network must have our corporate semantic endpoint security installed which includes whole drive encryption. As my PC was in the process of encrypting the drive it hung at 65% which hung the whole system (no boot nor system response). I thought "well that's weird", but there must be something corrupt on the drive so I reformated and reinstalled and restored the backups and restarted the install and encrypt process. It hung again at 65%. Ah Ha. I pulled out my copy of SpinRite and ran it on the drive. At 65% it found a damaged sector, which it fixed. After SpinRite finished I restarted the machine. The encryption process finished and all was happy in the IT world again. Sorry this is so long, but I just wanted to say thanks for all you do. Feel free to excerpt if you use this on the podcast.

Thanks
Joel Davis
Texas City, Texas

09/25/2011 — From a long time user

I've been a user of SpinRite through its many versions, and it has saved me from complete disaster more than a few times.

Months ago, I upgraded to SpinRite 6.0 even though I didn't have an immediate need for it. But, this morning, my normally problem-free laptop wouldn't boot; it just went into the BIOS setup over and over. So, I booted and ran SpinRite 6.0 from the CD drive. It immediately found--and fixed--a defective sector at the beginning of the disk. I then rebooted normally and everything was fine!

Thanks again to Steve. SpinRite has saved me many, many times what I've spent over the years; it's no doubt the single most valuable disk utility in existence.

10/22/2011 — eMail Subject: “happy user was able to save a USB drive from the trash can”

I've owned Spinrite for years, but never used it much. The boot CD just sat on the shelf.

Yesterday, one of my important USB hard drives failed to read. I believe the problem was caused by too much fragmentation and the drive got too full. (Thanks, Microsoft for you inadequate defrag utility!) I said, what the heck, I'll try the Spinrite CD and see it I can do anything.

Yep....in less than two hours, I had a working hard drive again! SpinRite had never seen this drive...it just went in and did the repairs. Well worth the $89 bucks that I spent several years ago for the program.

Thanks
Mike Goodrich
Columbia, MO

10/20/2011 — eMail Subject: “A SPinRite Tale”

Dear Steve,

I recently purchased my first copy of SpinRite to help with an issue I've been having with my laptop. Now, this isn't a story about how SpinRite saved me at the last second, of the last minute, of the last day before the Big Thing. Neither is this a story about how running SpinRite on Level 5 recovered my data AND found my neighbors lost kitten in the process. No, this is something more sublime.

Following other investigative procedures, I ran SpinRite on Level 4, and was able to determine that my physical memory dump blue screen errors (Windows XP, folks) are not related to drive issues, but more likely due to excess heat. (SpinRite told me about THAT!) But finally, long story short: I ran my Windows defrag utility on my 5-year old laptop *after* using SpinRite, and was then confronted with something I had NEVER seen before: A 100% perfectly defragmented main drive! I was intrigued when I first saw the red stripes of unmovable files -- that I had grown so used to -- beginning to disappear so rapidly in the defrag window, and then I froze when they disappeared altogether... and didn't come back. (I had to take a screenshot to prove this to myself after the utility was done) Apparently, I wasn't hallucinating. SpinRite has many uses as I've heard on the "Security Now!" podcast, but this is a great side-effect of the medicine that is SpinRite.

Thank you, I feel better now.
Sincerely,
Loncey Mills
New York, New York

08/31/2011 — eMail Subject: “SpinRite Success”

Thanks, Steve!

I haven't worked with SpinRite in quite a few years. Then I needed to run CHKDSK on my Dell Optiplex 755 over the weekend, and CHKDSK would hang at 36% during phase 5, checking available free space. No matter how long I let it run, CHKDSK would not continue, would not finish.

So I thought of SpinRite, accessed the web site, bought it, downloaded it, created the .ISO image, burned a bootable CD. I booted from the CD and got an Opcode error. Researching the error on the Internet, I found references to others with Optiplex 755 boxes trying to run SpinRite getting the error that indicated that changing the BIOS from RAID-AHCI to RAID-ATA would eliminate the Opcode error. So I changed the BIOS setting and restarted from the CD. Sure enough, SpinRite came right up with the familiar DOS interface that I had not seen in years.

SpinRite ran successfully at Level 2, restarted the workstation, ran CHKDSK successfully, booted up normally. Problem solved. I'm using it right now.

SpinRite and the other tools from GRC have helped me so many times over the years. I'm happy that you're still around and still making these tools available. I'm happy to have SpinRite back in my toolbox.

Great job, folks! Keep up the good work!

Thanks!
Terry LeBlanc

08/10/2011 — eMail Subject: “Spinrite fix disk at 20% failure”

Hey, I'm a 17 year old boy from Norway who loves your show. It was actually what got me into liking computers and I find it very easy to understand even for someone whit close to no prior experience with computers.

I started listening to Security Now just a couple of months ago, the first one I listen to was in fact the one about BITCOINS, then I listen to a few more before I decided to go back to the very beginning and I'm now at episode 115 (likely 150 when you read this :3). I love your show and have listened to it all summer long, on the plane, on the train and virtually everywhere.

Well I downloaded SpaceMonger to see what it was and I liked it. But on my 2 year old laptop it was unable to read approximately 20% of the drive, I didn't care to much about it at first as I have only used about 40% of the Hard Drive anyway (I like to keep it clean). But I had some problem with explorer.exe stops working, and it's a little hard to use a PC without it. This problem escalated after a while. And I decided to go into safe mode to do a full scan, however I had not gone into safe mode manually before. Ever. (I have just press the power button to shut it off and then on again, not good to the computer, but I'm a kid, please excuse me). So I figured it was probably in the BIOS menu or something. It isn't, but I found some hard drive scanning tools. Remembering in the back of my head that SpaceMonger had not found my entire hard drive I decided to run the tests. It told me that 80% of my disk was OK. Having 20% of my disk being dead was not a good thing. I knew exactly what I needed. SpinRite! I have been lent a copy from a relative of a friend of mine (I'm poor) and it worked perfectly! My disk is now 100% working and it have had no problems the last couple of weeks. I really want my own copy of SpinRite, but my parents are hard to convince and since I'm under age I need their permission and more importantly their credit card to make online purchases. So I decided that I will get SpinRite for Christmas this year. It will be my best present ever!

You're the best Steve!

Bent Heier
Oslo, Norway

08/14/2011 — eMail Subject: “SpinRite same my teeth”

SpinRite did it again. This time SpinRite saved my teeth!

Hello Steve, I decided I want to share this story with SpinRite followers.
I survived a car crash recently, caused by drunk driver, speeding and having difficulties controlling his BMW. This driver hit the car behind mine, and it hit mine. After all ended, i had some injuries on my head, nothing serious, but the most of my injuries required dental help. At this time i was unable to afford such serious interaction from a dentist, in terms of money. but i had no choice. health is most important.

A friend of mine is a dentist who has the equipment to heal me, and the qualifications to do so. I was about to ask him to give me time to pay him with few separate payments in time. he told me he cannot do much. his computer works poorly and cannot access all patient records, including my dental record. I told him i can fix this as soon as pain is relieved to be able to focus on the task at hand. he gave me pain killing injection and allowed me to fix his PC.

I booted SpinRite on level 4 to check his drive. We got to the problem late - the drive was in deep trouble already, but we got lucky, because it was not too late - we quickly saw green R icons when SpinRite began it's work. SpinRite found two areas that were bad. one contained one windows XP system .DLL file needed for the os, to work at all. The second area contained pieces of the database with the dental records.

While the dentist was trying to focus on my first healing session, i had firm belief in SpinRite. After 2 days of constant work, SpinRite completed the hard drive maintenance reporting that it successfully recovered all damaged areas and marking them as unusable for the drive. On the drive map, i saw 2 green R icons, which was what i was hoping for. i repeated the process. on the map i saw two B icons, on the places where the green R icons were before, indicating these areas will not be used again. after the second pass on level 4, SpinRite says that there were no bad areas. Great.

We booted the PC and jaws hit the floor. The system booted so very fast, and the database with all dental records was there in perfect condition opened in a second, and responding very fast to inputs, and searches. The dentist was so happy that he asked me for advice how to prevent this. I told him buy two NAS servers and use them as redundant backup for his data. i told him two in case one dies, to have another copy, for precaution.

The dentist promised me ... he will heal me for free.

Then, a few healing sessions later we made an arrangement. i will maintain and fix his computers, in return he will heal me every time i need dental help. i have 4 more healing sessions until i'm fully healed, and fully recovered.

Thank you Steve for this great piece of software, and thank you Steve and Leo for this great podcast. I wish best of luck to GRC.COM and TWIT.TV from a happy SpinRite User.

Christian Alexandrov
Sofia City, Bulgaria

11/05/2011 — eMail Subject: “YAT (Yet Another Testimonial)”

Steve,

Ho-hum, just another testimonial about a business saved by SpinRite.

Being a avid TWITer, I've been addicted to Security Now! since #1. Long about SN #50 I decided that I should invest in SpinRite for the 4 computers in my business. Since I don't have a dedicated IT dept, and I'm the resident geek, and I never made time for routine tests.

It was Microsoft's Tuesday Update on May 8 when it started. I had updated 3 of the computers when I was in the shop updating #4. All went well until the re-boot. Nothing. I tried booting off a boot CD, but dir C:\ reported nothing. I had not backup this computer in a little too long, and on it were critical customer files for some impending jobs. Yikes! What to do?

After much fretting and wringing of hands, I remembered I had invested in SpinRite after hearing you telling Leo about some of the letters you received. I got out the CD storage case and found SpinRite. I popped it in and ran the recovery. After a few hours I came back and it was finished. It had recovered some sectors and marked several others as unrecoverable. I held my breath and re-booted. The C:\ drive was back! And Windows seemed to start OK, but then it choked part way through with the error "ntoskrnl.exe" is missing or damaged. I'm no IT pro, but I knew a missing NT OS Kernel is not good.

A widows repair or re-install was in order. But I didn't want to risk loosing the critical customer files, so I decided to pull the hard drive and pop it into a USB case. I plugged it into another system and voila, the C: directory appeared. I copied the necessary customer files and directories and re-installed the hard drive in the system. All seemed to in order until I went to the CD storage case to get the Windows Home Install disk. Not to be found! I had the CDs for the other systems, but they were XP pro systems. I tried running the windows repair, but it reported missing file "ntfs.sys" I tried copying it from another system. but I got the same error. Clearly a reinstall was in order. Now if only SpinRite could "recover" the missing Windows Install CD...

The rest of the story: I was unable to locate the missing CD so I bought a Windows Home Upgrade CD and the system is up and running. Jobs got done and products delivered.

Thanks for the great product and for all your "white hat" products like "Shields UP" and the like. Keep up the good work and the fascinating netcasts with Leo.

Regards,
Bob Thibodeau
Imprinted Specialty Products Co.

08/03/2011 — eMail Subject: “Another Satisfied SpinRite Customer”

Dear Steve,

I've always been my parents tech support guy. When I joined the US Air Force, they stationed me pretty far away from home. Thankfully, I've always been able to VNC into their computers and get things straightened out. This week I was presented with a rather unique challenge. My mother called to tell me that their computer was throwing a bunch of disk errors in Windows. Fixing this problem was particularly difficult for two reasons. First, VNC wouldn't help them if their hard disk suddenly crashed. Second, I'm currently deployed to Afghanistan, where getting a good enough connection to VNC into their computer can be difficult. I knew that SpinRite might be able to fix the disk errors but would I be able to walk my parents (who aren't the most tech savvy people) though it over the phone?

Believe it or not, I able to get a good enough connection to VNC into their computer and make a SpinRite bootable image. I was also able to instruct my mother, over the phone, how to boot into SpinRite and start the repair process. She called me the next day and told me that SpinRite had fixed 12 errors and that their computer was back to normal.

I cannot tell you how much we appreciate your product. It really saved the day.

Jeremy Webb

07/26/2011 — eMail Subject: “SpinRite Story - Happy but Confused”

Steve,

I'm a Security Now listener and registered SpinRite owner of many years though I just had my first "opportunity" to use it. The experience left me happy but confused. Let me explain:

The other night we had a lightning storm and though my system was turned off and unplugged I believe a very close lightning strike may have caused the problem. When I booted my system, it booted OK but immediately started acting strange. Responses to my commands caused it to slow to a crawl. I'd launch a program and it would literally take a minute or so to respond - all the while showing the "busy circle thingy". I re-booted - same thing.

So I booted SpinRite - level 2. It ran for about an hour and stopped displaying a RED "Division Overflow Error" dialog box. The box displayed a bunch of HEX info (like error occurred at B04E, eax:00000CCA, ebx:0000003D, etc.) and asked me to write down all this data and re-boot SpinRite. It also said (I believe) that SpinRite would ask for this data to aid in its repair process.

I re-booted but could never see anything different than the normal SpinRite processes. I thought it was going to ask me for the data I copied.

Confused, I re-started level 2 figuring I'd get the same error and re-read the directions. To my amazement, I never got that error message. Instead, SpinRite stopped about 14% through and began "analyzing" a certain portion of the disk. It stayed there for over two hours until I went to bed (with it happily analyzing away).

I awoke this morning to a GREEN dialog box stating that SpinRite had completed its work - and the best news is that all is well with the system now!!

As I wrote, "Happy but confused". What happened? Did I miss something in the first RED error message that asked me to save and re-enter data when asked to do so? I was never asked.

Anyhow, I thought I'd share this story - thank you for all you do for the community.

Peace,
Mike DeLucia

07/10/2011 — eMail Subject: “Spinrite makes the other guys look good!”

I own a small IT consulting business (Wellmax Computer). I have been using Spinrite for almost 20 years. A customer brought an XP machine that was freezing. I knew that he was having problems with his hard drive. He wanted a new drive, not just to repair the old one. I had a drive cloning utility (shall remain nameless) and when setting up to clone one drive to the other was dismayed to see that it was projected to take 22 hours to finish the cloning process. This was a 500 Gig drive. Well after 24 hrs it had barely budged…maybe done 8%. My gut told me ......I think the source drive is having problems. So I ran Spinrite at level 4, 2 days later it had finished. I started the cloning process again and this time was done in 22 minutes instead of 22 hours. I got to thinking….why done these clone software manufactures don’t include Spinrite as part of their software? Of course there would be a royalty to you for each copy sold. This just seems a match made in heaven.
David Ward

07/09/2011 — A customer find SpinRite “elegant”.

Dear Steve,

Please add my name your long list of happy customers. My laptop, which I need tomorrow to teach my Anatomy and Physiology class, would not boot up properly. It took twenty minutes to get to my desktop, and everything I tried to do had a three or four minute delay.

The computer was unusable.

I called Dell, and the tech walked me through the dell diagnostics. The hardware all passed, including the hard drive. I was unable to use system restore (it crashed). The next step was to reinstall Windows, and of course all my programs. Fortunately, my data was backed up (mostly). Still, I had hours and hours of drudgery before me.

Before taking that drastic measure, I thought I might try the SpinRite utility. To be honest, I bought SpinRite as a way to thank you for your outstanding Security Now podcast, which has brought me so much enjoyment.

I was afraid it would require more expertise than I had to run it, but the program is very well designed to guide the user through the necessary options. I booted up from the SpinRite CD, and went to the recovery choice (#2). Then I left it alone. I came back later and saw one of the sectors was bad. SpinRite chewed on it for a bit, and then was finished.

I booted up without the CD, windows ran CHKDSK, and up came my login.

My laptop is now working perfectly.

When I took math in college, I learned that some theorem proofs are so beautiful they are called "elegant." Well SpinRite is an "elegant" utility. It sure saved me tonight.

Thank you so much for Security Now, and thanks for Spinrite. No-one who owns a computer should be without it.

Russ Palmeri

06/22/2011 — eMail Subject: “SpinRite Story”

Here is a SpinRite story for Steve:

I have a neighbor who has mild Altzheimer's who has been forced to give up his flat and move into a nursing home about 20 miles away on the other side of the city. His Compaq notebook computer has become his main way of keeping in contact with his family and friends. He is a bit of a Noob and he often manages to get it pretty tangled up. I often fix it for him when I visit him on Thursday afternoon on my way to Tai Chi. It is his lifeline so he works hard to learn new things and has progressed from email, to Skype to Google Earth.

Last month, just a couple of days before leaving for the US, I paid my friend a last visit and the inevitable disaster had occurred. The Compaq wouldn't boot. SpinRite immediately came to mind and I knew that it would be complicated and expensive for him to have the computer fixed commercially. My problem was getting it back to him before I had to fly out. Quick as a flash my friend saw the solution. I could leave it in his old flat to which we both have keys and he could retrieve it after I flew out using his electric scooter and Perth's excellent train system which can accommodate scooters during non peak periods. In the end that wasn't necessary.

When I got the Compaq home I immediately ran level 2 and it finished in less than an hour and booted up first time. No time consuming need to reinstall Windows and all those endless updates. To be safe I ran SpinRite on level 4 overnight and was able to drop the computer off the next day in plenty of time to catch my flight. I know it is still working because I get emails regularly.

Now, Steve, all we need is SpinRite for the human brain. I hereby volunteer for a level 4 scan anytime you are ready.

Lorenz Gude
Perth, western Australis
(Currently in West Palm Beach)

06/07/2011 — eMail Subject: “SpinRite feedback”

Dear Steve,

A co-worker & friend of mine recently told me about Security Now episode #291 which was all about the Stuxnet worm. As I listened to more episodes of Security Now, I figured out that you were indeed the inventor of the Gibson light pen! Which I fondly recall from my early days of learning to program computers.

Also, as I listened to Security Now I became curious about SpinRite because I frequently troubleshoot, diagnose and repair PCs for my family, extended family and friends. I didn't purchase SpinRite immediately, but planned to use it the next time I had a problem with a hard disk. As luck would have, shortly after I listened to episode #291, the hard disk in my teenage son's PC started making a strange noise and the system ran very slowly. Normally I just replace disks at the first instant they start acting unexpectedly, because that is usually an early indicator of eminent failure. This time I purchased SpinRite instead and ran it on my son's system in level 4 mode. SpinRite reported no problems, but the system has worked just fine ever since and I have been saved the cost of purchasing a new disk. By my calculations, SpinRite has now paid for itself and is essentially "free" for my future use!

Thanks for a great product,

Mark Botner
Little Rock, Arkansas

P.S. I'm now listening to ALL of the Security Now podcasts, starting with episode #1 and I am currently up to #64, they are fantastic podcasts!

05/27/2011 — eMail Subject: “Spinrite rescues some pictures, and a question of etiquette”

Hello. I'm a regular SN listener and I'd like to share this story with you.

I'm always on the look out for broken computer parts. When a friend's laptop broke down, he asked me if I wanted it, which I did. In the conversation, he told me he was a little depressed as there were lots of un-backed-up photos on the laptop. He had done "everything" to try rescue the files but he had lost all hope of recovering them.

I wondered if "everything" included SpinRite, but decided against asking as I didn't want to depress him or get his hopes up. Instead I gave the laptop to a friend (and fellow SN listener) and asked him to try his copy of Spinrite on it. Next day, he reported that it worked, but warned that the disk was not long for this world and I should make a backup while I still can.

Buzzed for a chance to be the hero, I booted the laptop up and prepared to copy the files onto a USB hard disk. Not knowing where his pictures were, I browsed into the "My Pictures" folder and found myself looking at some very pornographic pictures of my friend and his wife.

I quickly made a copy of the files, slightly embarrassed at what I saw. He must have been really convinced the contents were gone for good.

Now, I'm not sure what to do. He didn't ask me to recover the files but I know he really wants the pictures back. If I gave him a copy, he'd know I must have seen them. Any advice please?

Bill P. Godfrey
Daventry, England

04/22/2007 — eMail Subject: “Wow”

I applied SpinRite to a very old hard drive that had stop working, would not boot into safe mode or any other mode, and even though the drive had many unrecoverable sectors a one recoverable sector the drive now works. I am very happy that this product works like it said it would, I mainly use it for drive maintenance. Keep up the good work.

Sam, in Texas

09/01/2007 — From a Lockergnome blog posting: “Another SpinRite Success Story”

I've been using SpinRite for about six months now - the first time I tried it was on a customer's computer that wouldn't boot into Windows XP. I thought, well, I'll try this software first and - if it works - I'll save the customer the cost of backing up their data, reinstalling Windows and their other software. And it did!!

Then, Earlier this week it happened to me! - I got the BSOD INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error. When I ran the Windows CD to do a repair install, it did not see any Windows installation present. I ran SpinRite in Mode 2 (data recovery) and, after it finished, rebooted. Voila! Windows was back! By the way, Steve Gibson and/or GRC.com haven't paid me anything for this - I'm just happy to promote a product that has saved me time and money and may help someone else also.

Marc Erickson

16/12/2006 — A posting in the GRC “news.feedback” newsgroup

Steve,

I'm not sure if this is the correct place to post this - apologies if not!

Today I had my first opportunity to put SpinRite through its paces (I have owned a license for a couple of years now) when my girlfriend's laptop went belly up. This was particularly unfortunate timing as she is just completing a course (the exam's on Tuesday) and she was facing the possibility of losing all her course notes, plus access to the software she needed to revise to prepare for the exam.

Needless to say SpinRite worked beautifully and everything is back as it should be so a massive thanks from both of us!

Ed Metcalfe.

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!

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) 2024 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 24, 2024 at 20:38 (141.21 days ago)

Viewed 2 times per day