Overview

SpinRite's user interface presents a series of screens having a nominally linear flow from its startup through drive detection to a Main Menu. The Main Menu lists multiple options which offers various auxiliary functions. At every screen, prompts indicate what options are available to its user. SpinRite uses simple “cursor pad” Up, Down, Left, Right, Enter and Escape navigation to move among screens.

After one of more drives have been selected, SpinRite begins working on each drive in turn. While SpinRite is running on a drive, a browsable 7-screen “carousel” allows SpinRite's user to monitor its progress, operations and detailed drive status while logging everything encountered and all operations performed.

This “User Manual” page presents and describes SpinRite's primary screens in the generally linear order they will be encountered as SpinRite's user moves through SpinRite's use.

Let's Start SpinRite...

After Starting SpinRite from the DOS command line, the user will be presented with SpinRite's introduction screen:

You may immediately press any key (other than ESC) to proceed. If you do not, a few seconds after displaying SpinRite's copyright information and your licensed copy's serial number, the last line of the screen will change with instructions for continuing:

Pressing any key other than ESC displays the terms of SpinRite's license, reminding its user that their license entitles them to use SpinRite in any mass storage media they own, and asking them to please ask others to purchase their own copy. We have big plans for SpinRite, but it needs to pay its way for that to happen. Its users can help with that.

As before, pressing any key other than ESC acknowledges this screen and proceeds...

SpinRite depends upon the integrity of the system it runs on. Near the end of its extensive pre-release testing after SpinRite had added robust data verification operations, some of our testers encountered new problems. Since SpinRite v6.1 was not yet released, we assumed that SpinRite was at fault. But the problems turned out to be read/write errors in the main RAM memory of the several machines that were being used with SpinRite – and these were newer machines. Since SpinRite moves entire contents of modern drives into and out of memory, the integrity of that memory must be assured. So SpinRite v6.1 now incorporates a built-in test of the RAM memory buffers it will be using while it's running.

This memory testing continues until its user presses the Enter key to proceed. This can be initially unexpected and confusing since we're used to have a no/no-go decision made for us. But that's not feasible here. If a memory bit is “stuck” high or low, this test will find it almost instantly. But memory errors can be very subtle and can depend upon the bits surrounding them. RAM memory can also be “almost perfect”. But “almost” is not good enough for SpinRite.

So the rule of thumb should be to let this testing run as long as you can the first time SpinRite is being used on any machine for the first time. The screen will turn RED if any error is found, so that's easy to see. If you don't have time to let SpinRite sit for an hour or two, levels 1 and 2, which are read-only and read-mostly respectively, are safe to use without high confidence in a machine's RAM integrity. But any use of levels 3, 4 or 5 really should follow a one-time “burn-in” of SpinRite testing the memory of any machine that hasn't been tested before.

Strange as it may sound, the screen above is one you will probably never see. It will almost always flash past so quickly that, if you notice it at all, you'll briefly wonder “what was that?” then you'll forget about it as SpinRite locates and identifies the machine's various mass storage devices.

This very transient screen was created because there is BIOS firmware out in the world that hangs the entire system when it encounters damaged USB-connected drives. And since SpinRite's users are likely to be connecting damaged drives to their machines for repair, this could occur. Nothing is harmed by this happening, but before this screen was created, the “hang”, if it was going to occur, would occur during the next screen, while SpinRite was locating and enumerating the system's drives. A hang at that point looked like something was wrong with SpinRite, when the fault was the BIOS, over which SpinRite has no control. This screen exists to diagnose “hung BIOS” trouble and let SpinRite's owner know what happened. You will probably never encounter it.

Getting down to business

This screen lists the mass storage devices SpinRite finds attached to the system. It shows the best (closest to the hardware) interface method it has found to use, the drive's port or BIOS number, the drive's self-reported running time (usually in hours, but not always) the drive's reported size, its make, model and serial number. Once SpinRite has found all available devices it will prompt the user to proceed.

SpinRite's Main Menu allows SpinRite's user to choose from among SpinRite's 5 operating levels and explains each of them. But as a convenience, since choosing a level is the most often setting need, this screen allows SpinRite's use to check its current level setting and change it with a single keypress if desired. So press a key between 1 and 5, or just hit Enter to leave the level unchanged and proceed to the Main Menu.

Main Menu

Let's examine the Main Menu's first five items (since “Exit” should be self-explanatory.)

Select drives for operation

The drive selection screen allows the user to choose which one or more of the system's drives they wish to use. During the drive enumeration, SpinRite performs a brief read performance benchmark which it uses to estimate the time required to perform a real-mostly level 1 or 2 scan of the entire drive. This is shown in the “ScanTime” column. Note that is both the most common and the fastest of SpinRite's operating levels. Level 2 reads the entire media, stopping only to perform recovery and repair when a serious read problem is reported by the drive.

The cursor pad's up/down arrow keys move the highlight up and down and the spacebar toggles the highlighted drive's selection on and off. The left and right arrows rotate the highlighted tab at the top of the right hand window to show additional information about the highlighted drive. The screen above shows the contents of the drive information tab where, for example, we see that a 500GB Samsung EVO SSD has a SATA III connection and extremely good performance of nearly 570 megabytes per second. This results in an estimated whole drive scan time of 16.1 minutes – for half a terabyte. Pressing the right arror key, switched to the “hardware”tab, which shows additional hardware features of the drive:

And pressing the right arrow key again, rotates to the “smart stat” tab which shows a collection of the drive's current SMART parameters:

The supplementary Screen Details page explains SpinRite's display of SMART data.

View or change settings

The second selection on the Main Menu presents this “View or Change Settings” screen which allows SpinRite's operational settings to be changed and customized. Any changes made here will automatically be saved into a companion “SPINRITE.CFG” file in the same directory as SpinRite's executable .EXE file. This makes them “sticky” so that they will be remembered to become SpinRite's default setting until it's changed again. This automatic saving may be prevented by including the “nocfg” option on SpinRite's command line. If this option is present, existing settings will be used, but any changes made during that use of SpinRite will not be saved – they will have effect for the current session only.

Although the name of each of the settings on this screen should be self explanatory, the selection of any item on this screen will present another option-setting screen which provides further detail and clarification.

Perform drive benchmarks

The third, “Perform Drive Benchmarks” selection on the Main Menu, allows SpinRite's user to perform read performance benchmarks on any of the drives SpinRite found during its initial drive discovery. As seen on the two screens above and below, drives are listed on the left with their corresponding performance shown on the right during and after benchmarks have been performed. SpinRite measures the time required to obtain the drive's SMART data, the time required to retrieve a random sector, and the drive's read performance at three locations on the drive: at the front, in the middle and at the back of the drive.

The screen above shows the typical uniform performance pattern of a brand new or empty solid state drive (SSD). An SSD that has been in service for some time will typically exhibit slower performance – sometimes much slower performance – at the front of the drive due to long-term read disturbance and charge leakage. Running SpinRite at level 3 often significantly improves such drive performance.

The screen below shows the typical “fast at the front and slow at the back” pattern that's always present in spinning magnetic hard disc drives (HDD). The drive's beginning outer drive tracks can store more data, so each revolution of the disc is able to read more, resulting in higher speed. By comparison, the inner tracks near the end of the drive's storage are much shorter – often half as long – as the outer tracks. So the same revolution of the disc is only able to transfer half as much data, resulting in half the performance of the outer tracks at the front of the drive. And this is exactly what we see in the benchmark results shown below:

SpinRite's stand-alone drive benchmarking can reveal a great deal about the performance and health of any drive.

Review previous operation log

The fourth “Review previous operation log” Main Menu selection presents the detailed findings and event log of whatever operations SpinRite has performed. This log is always available and reviewable as one of the seven screens in SpinRite operational “carousel” while it is running. But it can be useful to review the log after SpinRite has finished its operations, the user has returned to the Main Menu and SpinRite's seven screen “carousel” is no longer available. This Main Menu option allows for that review.

Frequently asked questions

It can be handy to have a quick reference to SpinRite's most often asked questions built into the product itself. This fifth “Frequently Asked Questions” Main Menu option presents a scrollable and directly jump-able collection of handy usage tips.

Once the desired options have been set using the second “View or Change Settings” Main Menu selection, and one or more drives have been selected for operation using the Main Menu's first “Select Drive(s) for level:” menu, as instructed on that drive selecting screen, the Enter key is pressed to advance SpinRite to the pre-start verification screen:

Starting SpinRite after selecting drive(s)

This “Before Beginning” screen provides a final confirmation of SpinRite's operating level and allows the starting and ending locations of SpinRite's operations to be changed from their default of the entire drive – starting at 0% and running to 100%. By pressing the TAB key at this screen, the screen below will be shown:

This screen's (above) flashing cursor can be moved up and down to alter the starting and finishing points of any selected drives (and drive selections can also be toggled here). The cursor can be moved left and right to edit the current location and the TAB key jumps between the Starting and the Finishing columns. SpinRite shows drive locations as both a percentage of the drive and as the drive's physical sector number. Entering a pound (#) sign switches to physical sector display and entering a period (. decimal point) switches to percentage display.

When SpinRite's operation on a drive is interrupted, the location of the interruption will be shown to four significant decimal places. This allows an interrupted operation to later be resumed at the same location by using this screen to change the starting location from 0% to the interruption percentage point. And if work needs to be done on specific sectors or physical sector ranges those can be specified with the pound (#) sign.

A screen you might encounter

Whenever levels 3, 4 or 5 are chosen, if SpinRite also detects that any selected drive drive should not be unnecessarily written to, this reminder screen will be shown. Clearly, all storage media needs to be written to. But some forms of media such as SSDs and Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives have media which is either slightly fatigued by writing (SSDs) or go through a great deal of work when they are being written to (SMR drives).

There can be very good reasons for writing to media. We have found that occasional rewriting of entire SSDs can be hugely beneficial for their long term storage performance and reliability. But unnecessary writing to spinning shingled storage drives should probably only be rewritten during necessary data recovery. So this screen is not intended to be frightening. It's just a reminder that running any of SpinRite's three upper levels which rewrite everything should only be done deliberately.

SpinRite's Operating Screens Carousel

While SpinRite is running it maintains a set of seven screens which may be rotated among in carousel-like fashion or jumped to directly:

The screens may be accessed three different ways:

1. The left/right cursor pad arrows: These rotate among the seven screens in round robin fashion. Although there are several other ways of choosing which screen to display, the left/right arrow keys tend to be used most often.
2. Pressing the spacebar while SpinRite is running will display a pop-up menu which overlays SpinRite's screens. This menu is show in the center above. While this menu is present, the up/down keys will move the menu's highlight which will also change screens. It's also possible to type the number of any screen shown on the menu to jump directly to that screen. Pressing the spacebar again or Enter will remove the screen selection pop-up menu.
3. The 1-7 numeric keys shown on the pop-up screen selection menu may be pressed at any time to jump directly to any screen.

1. Graphic Status Display

SpinRite's Graphic Status Display maps the drive's storage into a grid to show SpinRite's progress and the history of what it has found so far. SpinRite shows the quantity of storage it has processed and how much remains. It also shows this as percentages and as time estimates. What SpinRite shows here is the data for the operating range that was specified earlier. For example, if the starting point is 45% and the ending point is 55%, that SpinRite's percentage display still ranges from 0% to 100% because it's showing the percentage of the job it's been asked to do. Since it can also be useful to see where within that range it is, the drive's physical percentage will be shown in the blank region of the “work” column to the left of the first '%' sign.

2. Real-Time Activities

The Real-Time Activities screen shows what SpinRite is doing from instant to instant. The moving highlight on the left shows the specific operation SpinRite is performing on the drive. The two columns of counts at the lower right show the count of various types of trouble SpinRite has encountered, and the “Raw Data Snapshot” window provides a peak into the data SpinRite has just read from the drive.

3. Detailed Technical Log

Before, during and after its operation on any drive, SpinRite collects everything relevant to the drive and SpinRite's operation on it into a detailed technical log. This includes the drive's information from before SpinRite run, any benchmarking that was done, the important information from these screens, and the drive's final status. SpinRite also logs the details of everything it discovers about the drive's storage media as it proceeds. This screen allows everything SpinRite has logged during the current session to be reviewed by scrolling from start to finish. Note that unless log saving has been deliberately disabled, this log will be permanently saved in successively numbered log files to the drive from which SpinRite was run.

4. S.M.A.R.T System Monitor

A case could be made for SpinRite's S.M.A.R.T. (Self Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) screen being among SpinRite's most important. The reason for this is that SMART data reflects the drive's own self reported experience of reading from a drive. But if a drive is not being worked the SMART data doesn't have much to go on. The screen above was taken during SpinRite's operation on the brand new 4 terabyte Seagate drive shown earlier in these screen shots. It shows that the drive's own “self health” measure has been pushed down to 31 from its starting value of 56. This “push down” is highlighted with red blocks to draw SpinRite's user to this fact. This doesn't necessarily mean that the drive is in trouble, but it would be useful to compare it with another of the same make and model to determine whether this drive might have a problem that's uncommon. Overall, this screen displays the most interesting and useful SMART parameters which are published by most drives. What any specific drive offers varies by make and model.

5. DynaStat Data Recovery

When you read about SpinRite performing miracles of data recovery – which many of SpinRite's long time users will joyfully describe – that's typically due to SpinRite's legendary DynaStat data recovery system. Mass storage drives do not take a lot of time trying to obtain data that they are unable to completely correct. SpinRite is willing to do much more, repositioning the heads between tries to obtain slightly different track positioning for every retry, examining the drive to determine whether any (partial) data was read, and if so how much. And much more. While all this is happening, this screen will show what SpinRite has found so far.

6. Change Operation Level

Since SpinRite's primary setting is its operating level, it made sense to allow SpinRite's user to easily change that setting “on the fly” any time they wish for any reason while SpinRite is operating.

7. Screen Blanker

Although a “screen blanker” is not as necessary as it once was in the era of phosphor cathode ray tubes which could be “burned” by a fixed image, LCDs and early OLEDs still exhibit some long term aging effects. SpinRite defaults to using no automatic screen saver but this 7th screen in the carousel rotation offers it. It can be moved to with a manual selection or of the timed screen saver is enabled, SpinRite will jump to this screen after an elapsed time of keyboard inactivity.

Even though SpinRite v6.1 runs as fast as its drive can go, today's larger multi-terabyte drives still require many hours of time to process. This is especially true for SpinRite's higher levels which require it to backtrack to rewrite and reread. It is therefore necessary to allow SpinRite's operation to be interrupted at any time.

At any time while SpinRite is operating, pressing the ESC key will interrupt and pause SpinRite's operation and will display this red “SpinRite Interruption Options” pop-up menu. The menu's options are clear and self explanatory. ESC may be pressed again to cancel the interruption. The highlight can be moved to the desired option by number or by moving the highlight up or down, then the Enter key will take the requested action.

Depending upon SpinRite's current operating level and what it was doing at the moment of interruption, some time may be required to finish its current work. Once it has, the “Operation Interruption Notice” screen will be displayed...

This screen provides the location where SpinRite was interrupted to four significant decimal places. SpinRite is careful to round this down so that later restarting SpinRite at this starting percentage will not skip any of the media's content. SpinRite does not record this stopping point so a note must be made of it before pressing the ESC key.

Other miscellaneous screens

SpinRite contains many other screens in additional to the primary screens described on this page. They will be presented, as needed, during SpinRite's operation. In every case, the screen will explain what's going on, why it's been shown, what should be done or what options SpinRite's user has. In general, SpinRite's operation should be very clear and self explanatory.