[Novalug] More observations on spinrite

[Bonnie Dalzell]

I purchased spinrite two days ago.

it seems to be working well but with huge multigig harddrives it takes a 
long time to process the drive. my 160 gig partition has an estimated 
processing time of 86 hours but you can pause spinrite and restart at 
another time. good thing I have the cheap linux laptop even if i do make a 
lot of typos with it.

If you happen to have a multiboot system where you have installed freedos 
in a small partition then with linux and wine you can make the little 
spinrite iso image, open the iso and copy spinrite.exe to your freedos 
partition and then when you boot into freedos spinrite can be run directly 
from your harddrive. it can even process the partition it was booted from.

I have not yet experiemented to see if the spinrite.exe as downloaded also 
does this if copied direcetly to freedos. the tech support at spinrite 
says you cannot launch the installation directly from freedos but I am 
wondering if they are wrong.

If you have dosemu and freedos installed under linux you can start 
xdosemu and the start spinrite and you get as far as choosing what drive 
to process and then it hangs up. i wish it could be run in the background 
on the second drive while the system is booted into linux.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
                        Bonnie Dalzell, MA
mail:5100 Hydes Rd ---- Hydes MD USA 21082-----EMAIL:bdalzell at qis.net

freelance anatomist, vertebrate paleontologist, writer, illustrator, dog
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