Spinrite.

Tim Chase blinux.list at thechases.com
Thu Dec 26 17:08:25 UTC 2013


On December 26, 2013, Anders Holmberg wrote:
> Has anyone on the list tried spinrite for linux?
> There seems to be a version but i am not sure if its console or gui
> based. It might or might not work with screenreaders or brltty.

Based on what I've picked up on Steve Gibson's "Security Now"
podcast, I believe that Spinrite has its own boot loader, possibly
FreeDOS, so you boot it on its own.  I also understand that it's
OS-agnostic regarding the content of the drive, so you can check any
type of OS/drive regardless of how it's formatted or partitioned.

It might be possible to use a screen-reader with it if you had the
following scenario:

  1) boot an accessible OS that doesn't touch the drive you want to
  test (perhaps from a CD or flash drive)

  2) bring up an accessible virtualization program (I'm ignorant in
  this department, but others might chime in).  This is the key
  element, so you'd have to test this first.  Perhaps boot a FreeDOS
  boot-disk in a virtual machine and play around to make sure it does
  what you want.

  3) mount the actual drive that you want to check as a virtual drive
  in the virtual machine

  4) mount the SpinRite boot disk in the virtual machine

  5) boot the VM off the SpinRite drive

Theoretically, it should start up, see the virtual drive and operate
on it as if you had it in a real machine, but being made accessible
via the virtualization program.  Steve mentioned folks doing
something like this successfully, but you might want to ring their
tech-support to verify that.

-tim






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