SpinRite on VMWare
I know that the SpinRite FAQ specifies that as long as you can see the drive in DOS you should be able to use SpinRite on it. However, some of my external USB drives do not seem to work with the DOS drivers I find on the Internet. Anyway, I had a thought that maybe I could run SpinRite in VMWare, and I found that someone had done it on a Mac.
I have a good news for mister Gibson: SpinRite would actually work on the Mac with VMWare
So I took the idea for a test drive. I guess I wanted to make sure that those external drives would last a bit longer especially hearing from my friend that one of his drives died recently (good thing it was RAIDed). I created a small virtual machine and made it use the physical drive which points to my USB drive. Then I created the ISO image from the SpinRite executable and made the VM boot to the ISO image.
Before I start anything I run chkdsk /f on the drive to make sure that there are no open handles on the drive itself. Once that completes I started the VM.
It seems to work quite well. There is no SMART support though, but I guess that is fine according to the screen it says that maintenance and recovery operations remain functional.
It is quite slow. An estimate of over 6 hours for a 80Gig hard drive on level 4.
Labels:
windows
4 comments:
I was hoping you could share with me how you got this working. I'm currently trying to get an external usb hard drive to be seen by SpinRite under Parallels. I haven't been successful yet.
Is it VMWare Fusion that you're running?
Drop me a line please, I'd really appreciate it.
davidmg7@gmail.com
No, I am using VMWare on the PC. I can't afford a Mac yet :D
If you haven't run spinrite on a mac under vmware please don't post that it will work. It will not work. I've tried it.
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