A little birdie ( cough Security Now podcast cough) told me that the next a future episode of Kno...

[G+_John Mink]

A little birdie ( cough Security Now podcast cough) told me that the next a future episode of Know How was going to be on (or at least include) how to make a low cost SpinRite rig.

 

I'm curious as to why you'd recommend going with a dedicated machine vs a VM, as Spinrite lends itself so well to a non-dedicated machine.  Is SpinRite less effective in a VM over bare metal?  If so, what is it exactly that the VM does?  Would a hypervisor suffer the same limitations??

[G+_Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ]

Probably not the next episode... just the next episode that I need to prep for... I prep our segments WEEKS in advance because I need time for some of them to fail. :)

[G+_John Mink]

Noted.

 

And yes, demo fail is bad enough on small things much less a whole show!

[G+_Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ]

Yup... Bryan Burnett & I run a tight ship... You don't see anything unless we've done it at least twice. -- Takes more time (MUCH more time), but I think the end product is tighter and more entertaining.

[G+_John Mink]

As if we needed more evidence that you're insane.... But we do appreciate it :p

[G+_John Mink]

That said, I like the idea of doing something twice. I imagine it makes you far more confident in your results & procedure... But like you said, that's alot of time!

[G+_Travis Hershberger]

To answer your original question about SpinRite.  You can run it in a VM, yes.  It generally can't work all it's magic with the emulated BIOS in most virtual environments however.  Personally I do run it in a VM often in level 1 to do a quick-n-dirty test, and if that fails run a full level 4 on a dedicated box.

 

Also gotta give Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ props.  I knew you guys do a lot of legwork and prerecords, and the speed and quality of the show really does reflect it.

[G+_Jason Davis]

For some reason I find a very can scan faster not sure why but a 2tb drive will be half the time or better on a USB 3 connection and vm.

[G+_Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ]

Jason Davis that's because SpinRite isn't doing most of its magic over a USB 3 connection.

[G+_Jason Davis]

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ but why is it faster than a dedicated SATA III port?  For some reason using the VM is faster than the same computer booting directly.  Only downside is the SMART data doesn't pass to VM.  I can't wait for Steve to finish up Squirrel, he keeps teasing us about how fast the new SpinRite is going to be. 

[G+_Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ]

Jason Davis It's not about the speed of the connection. It's about what Spinrite is trying to accomplish. It doesn't have BIOS-level access to the hard drive hardware if you're using an USB enclosure, so it's tests are going to be much faster. (Because they're not as thorough)

[G+_Russ Hall]

Next version of Spinrite will be faster, and free upgrade to purchasers of 6.0

[G+_Steve Honaker II]

If I remember correctly Steve Gibson explained why Spinrite ran faster in a Virtual Machine, but I can't seem to find the episode where he talked about it. I thought it was something complicated about limitations of an actual bios, that the bios of the emulator handled differently, but I'm really not sure on the specifics. Maybe Padre could ask Steve about it on next week's Security Now episode to add it into the Know How Spinrite episode.

[G+_Steve Honaker II]

Found it. Transcript from SN episode 435

 

LEO:  I am perfectly happy to do as many as you choose at the time of your choosing.  Question 1 from Richard, he asks about running SpinRite in a virtual machine.  That's interesting.  My TiVo recently stopped working.  I put the TiVo's 320GB hard drive into my PC so SpinRite could fix it.  It ran on a Level 2 scan twice.  SpinRite found and recovered data from bad sectors on both passes.  The number of bad sectors found on the second pass was fewer, but they still were present.  So I decided to run a deeper Level 4 scan to really root out the problems.

 

After I started the scan, SpinRite reported it was estimating 30 hours to complete the scan.  I let it go overnight, but since I needed my computer back for the work week, I had to stop the Level 4 scan at about 50%.  I then got to wondering, can I run SpinRite in a virtual machine so that I could use my PC?  Because SpinRite works in a DOS box, or a FreeDOS box.  So he wants to know, could he do that and still get to use Windows?  He says he found your tweet from January with a link to step-by-step instructions on how to use VirtualBox - the free VM - for just such a task.

 

I got VirtualBox installed and configured and started a Level 4 scan on the TiVo hard drive.  To my amazement, the Level 4 scan was flying.  Then, after the usual 60-second sampling, the estimated time populated.  It said it would only need about four hours.  I verified that Level 4 was in fact running.  It was.  So that long hoo-round is all to the point of saying:  Does running SpinRite in a virtual machine cause it to run better than booting it from a CD?  This is the same hardware.  Is SpinRite really working while running in the VM?  Maybe it was just making up those numbers.  Seven-fold increase in speed, what's the story?

 

STEVE:  Okay.  So I wanted to - this is a great case in point for what essentially is a tip for anyone who is wanting to run SpinRite at maximum speed on a motherboard BIOS that won't run at maximum speed.  And that is SpinRite 6 today.  What happened is that Richard has a BIOS that is not doing Ultra DMA by itself.  And SpinRite 6 famously still runs through the BIOS.  Many people have motherboards with BIOSes that natively support Ultra DMA transfers, in which case SpinRite gets the advantage of that and runs at full speed.  The VirtualBox virtual machine that Richard was using, and VirtualBox, has a state-of-the-art virtual BIOS.  So you can run SpinRite in a VirtualBox VM, and it will be guaranteed to run at full SpinRite 6 speed, which, as you can see, like in this case, was seven times faster on that particular motherboard.

 

So this was an interaction between SpinRite 6's use of the BIOS and the fact that that motherboard wasn't doing Ultra DMA.  Many other motherboards do Ultra DMA, in which case SpinRite always runs at that speed without putting it in a VM.  And of course the reason everyone's excited about SpinRite 6.1 is it will always get that speed because I will no longer be using the BIOS on any platforms.  And in fact we'll get a lot more speed because I'll be talking natively to the drives and using a 32MB buffer.  I don't remember now the benchmarks that we were making back when I was working on 6.1 before suspending that to get SQRL finished.  But I remember that - what I remember was a 4TB drive we would then be able to do overnight.  So you'd be able to run SpinRite on a full 4TB, like, overnight.

 

SpinRite 6 won't run that fast because it doesn't use a large enough buffer to do that.  But it can run at maximum speed in a VirtualBox VM.  So people sometimes say, hey, Steve, I'm creating a machine that I want to use just to run SpinRite on.  And so absolutely setting it up with VirtualBox and seeing whether it runs faster in VirtualBox than it does natively is something worthwhile because VirtualBox has a very good virtual BIOS that it brings along.

[G+_Jeff Gros]

Cannot wait to hear the KH episode on the dedicated spinrite machine.

 

Just this week I had an old WD passport (300 gb, 2008 era) which stopped working. I couldn't even mount the drive. I took it apart and ran spinrite on it. A few unrecoverable sectors were found, but a few days later I have a drive that I can mount and suck files off of.

 

Spinrite saves the day again. This is like the 5th harddrive its recovered for me now! Buying spinrite is the best money I ever spent.

[G+_Jason Marsh]

Every machine I fix that comes from a friend or family member gets a SpinRite run as a matter of course. Sometimes I find very old drives that are in great shape, and newer drives that are silently failing. It has been an indispensible tool.

 

I have a "workstation" that is only used for malware removal, data recovery and cloning, which let's me work on other things while tools are working on the drive, like cleaning out the dust bunnies, applying new thermal compound, and retrieving feathers from laptop fans.