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I bought Spinrite ahead of upgrading a pc to Windows 10 as it seemed a good point to "tidy house...


G+_Neil Carmichael
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I bought Spinrite ahead of upgrading a pc to Windows 10 as it seemed a good point to "tidy house" but ...spinrite need to boot into freedos to run and my laptop is UEFI so cannot boot the "conventional"  usb boot images, has anyone had any luck with getting this working in this situation?

 

I tried their tech support and they weren't much help and I'm out of the returns period.

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Neil Carmichael??? Your issue may not be your UEFI/BIOS. Did you use the version of FreeDOS that came with the SpinRite image? That's version FreeDOS 1.0. If so, there are lots of issues with USB booting in 1.0. Make a generic FreeDOS 1.1 bootdisk and copy the SpinRite files to the new disk. See if that works.

 

P.S. I just sent GRC support?? an email on this specific issue.

 

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Ben Tyger Spinrites own mechanism for creating a bootdisk didn't work at all, I ended up using a usb boot maker that included freedos then copying spinrite into it

 

I did email them about another problem (the gui weirdly requires you to click a mouse and hold a keyboard key simultaneous which my pc can't  seem to do) but they didn't seem particularly engaged

 

Steve seems such a genuine guy and the product sounds really good so I didn't want to simply ask for a refund.

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First, Wayne Hobbins?, that's cool that you were able to make the USB UEFI compatible.

 

Second, if you don't want to do that, you should be able change the boot from UEFI in "BIOS" (or whatever it's called now). I just did that on my wife's laptop to get a flash drive to boot.

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+1 for Rufus. I've used it to make USB boot drives for a number of things, SpinRite included. I've also had good luck with running SpinRite in MS DOS. I can't recall if I've had luck with SR on drives built with the tools available at PenDriveLinux, though.

 

I still have to go into BIOS/UEFI and change the settings for the SATA controller between MBR/GPT depending on the disk and system, but that'll be straightened out in SR 6.1.

 

My best SpinRite story is of a win server 2k machine I recovered two years ago, which it turned out had a copy of SpinRite sitting in Administrator's personal folders. He must not have used it because the machine ran like a top after a SR level 2 run.

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  • 3 months later...
  • 4 weeks later...

* I took a crappy usb key that I had hanging around

* Rufus then made it in a bootable freedos dos key

* I then copied spinrite.exe to its root

 

* I then hit Google, what I needed to know is how to enable my bios' legacy mode, disable secure boot and enable usb booting

* having done all that I was able to go to the bios boot selector and choose use "hard drive"

* once at the dos prompt I just had to type spinrite

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