Peter z80.eu
Experienced Member
- Joined
- Apr 21, 2016
- Messages
- 91
Yesterday I powered my IBM 5155 on, played a while with programs on it, and remembered CHKDSK told me there are 110KB bad clusters.
So I decided, regardless of the fact, that I didn't recognized so far any read error before, to try a run with SPINRITE II (= analyze and refresh).
After waiting 4 hours, it had reached 15% and i was bored to wait so long, so I stopped it by pressing ESC (= controlled end).
What a surprise then: Now the drive seeks unmotivated many times, and I got 250KB in bad clusters.
Also, and this is what I didn't understand, files which could be loaded without any problems now *after* the SPINRITE run aren't loaded anymore and I got read errors. I expected not to get errors in files, which I used a lot of times 'errorfree' before.
My impression is now, SPINRITE is like a stress test, and drives which seems to be working before using SPINRITE are after applying the software 'stressed', means less reliable working, especially if the drives are already getting (very) old. So from my expirience I made, SPINRITE turned it bad instead of good, compared to the condition the drive showed me before.
Is SPINRITE something like 'snake oil', and should someone better copy files to an external drive for a backup, then using, if really needed, the low level routine of the MFM controller instead (which do not 'scrub' many times on the same place), and after all, copy the files back ?
So I decided, regardless of the fact, that I didn't recognized so far any read error before, to try a run with SPINRITE II (= analyze and refresh).
After waiting 4 hours, it had reached 15% and i was bored to wait so long, so I stopped it by pressing ESC (= controlled end).
What a surprise then: Now the drive seeks unmotivated many times, and I got 250KB in bad clusters.
Also, and this is what I didn't understand, files which could be loaded without any problems now *after* the SPINRITE run aren't loaded anymore and I got read errors. I expected not to get errors in files, which I used a lot of times 'errorfree' before.
My impression is now, SPINRITE is like a stress test, and drives which seems to be working before using SPINRITE are after applying the software 'stressed', means less reliable working, especially if the drives are already getting (very) old. So from my expirience I made, SPINRITE turned it bad instead of good, compared to the condition the drive showed me before.
Is SPINRITE something like 'snake oil', and should someone better copy files to an external drive for a backup, then using, if really needed, the low level routine of the MFM controller instead (which do not 'scrub' many times on the same place), and after all, copy the files back ?