SpinRite 6 on external Toshiba usb disk

After 827 days of running time my RaspiBlitz BTC lightning node refused to mount the external hard drive (Toshiba HDTB410EK3AA Canvio Basics, USB 3.0, 1TB). Smart errors of the weirdest kind. I remembered Gibson’s spammy advertisements during the Security Now! Podcast, praising SpinRite for recovery. As there was no physical damage / interaction that would have caused that i gave it a try.

After i bought the license, i downloaded the exe causing first problem, how to run on Linux? I have a Windows 7 laptop for such cases, so i executed the program and tried all the different options to create a bootable USB, finally succeeding by writing out the diskette spinrite.img to harddisk, then dd-ing it onto a usb flash drive:

dd if=/path/to/SpinRite.img conv=notrunc of=/dev/<your usb device, i.e. sda>

After rebooting the same laptop with the external USB disk attached, SpinRite started right away, and luckily for me, the drive was instantly recognized; no need for driver voodoo on the included FreeDOS distribution - that was my biggest concern. Probably the fact that the external disk is not a casing with some exotic usb-controller, but a disk with an integrated usb port helped a lot. A small downer was the unavailability of smart data for SpinRite - I don’t have a theory about that.

The first run failed with a program abort:

This is ongoing.