Running Spinrite

I started to hear bad noises from my 2nd internal hard drive that I use for video. The drive is from Seagate and it is 1TB that is about a year old.

I do backups of everything except my video drive because it is too big. So I purchased SpinRite, because I listen to Steve Gibson on Security Now and I have heard good success stories from the show.

I downloaded it off the website and created a CR-R of the ISO. I forgot that simply copying the ISO file on to the drive wouldn’t work so I use a freeware tool from http://www.nbxsoft.com/ “Free Create-Burn ISO Image” to create the ISO image.

I tried booting from the CD drive (actually a DVD drive) and the FreeDOS would come up on the screen (see below) but that is as far as it would go and then I would see a bunch of weird letters on the screen after about 4 minutes after the InitDisk command.

I thought I made a bad ISO, so I created another one but this time on a DVD+R. But I got the same result as pictured above.

So then I tried the 2nd ISO disk in my wife’s HP computer and it ran SpinRite just fine.

So I know I created the CD correctly, but what do I do now? Do I try a USB drive next?

UPDATE 1: Since I knew my wife’s computer worked I moved the bad drive over to her computer and now I have it scanning. It says it will be done in 24 hours so I will let you know what I find out then. I have the hard drive docked in my docking station connected by USB so it might be running slower than with SATA.

But I would still like to getting it working on my other machine.

UPDATE 2:

SpinRite had the following issue, what do I do now? About 7% of the way through (on level 2) the follow message. Division Overflow Error!

The drive is a Seagate ST31000340AS. Also I am running the latest version of SpinRite I downloaded yesterday.

This is the response I got from Greg at GRC:

Similar issue relating to FreeDOS.

So, you will need to create a MS-DOS boot diskette instead.

Making a boot CD . . .

If you have a CD-R drive, you can get an ISO image of a “Windows 98 SE Boot CD” here . . .

<http://www.allbootdisks.com/downloads/ISO/AllBootDisks_ISO_Image_Downloads25/Win98_bootdisk.iso>

Once created, boot with the above CD and then once at the DOS prompt
put in the SpinRite CD and type   spinrite   at the DOS prompt to
start SpinRite manually.

The A: prompt is a pseudo prompt.  During the boot process, just above the A: prompt, there is probably a listing for the CD-ROM drives.  Which ever letter it shows (in my case it shows F:), that is the drive you need to switch to first, then put in the SpinRite CD and type SpinRite at that prompt.

Update 3: Even after unsuccessfully running SpinRite it appears the 1TB drive is working (not making noises and locking up the computer) and I am half way finished copying over the files to the new drive.

I called Seagate and they told me I could send them the defective drive that I purchased last Dec 08 for $179 to get a new replacement.