Spinrite.

[Janina Sajka]

So, the goal is to check the integrity of a hard drive? If so, there are
far better ways, imo, to go about this task. My approach would be to
first boot grml then use standard Linux tools, e.g. e2fsck and the
smartmontools like smartctl.

This approach is fully accessible.

So, what does spinWrite give you that you can't do per the above?

Janina

Tim Chase writes:
> 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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Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
			sip:janina at asterisk.rednote.net
		Email:	janina at rednote.net

Linux Foundation Fellow
Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup:	http://a11y.org

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
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