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vmdk file (if that’s what you named it) for each partition you listed above (1,2). Here you should see the files that makeup the. Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/disk2 1,2 ~/Documents/Virtual Machines/SpinRite.vmwarevm/rawDiskFile ideĪfter you execute this command successfully you can option click the SpinRite.vmwarevm file and choose Show Contents.
Spinrite 6 usb boot how to#
Make sure to include the ide designator at the end so the VM knows how to mount the drive. Now I used rawDiskfile but this is the name of your vmdk file and can be called whatever you like. vmwarevm Virtual Machine that you created earlier (in my case ~/Documents/Virtual Machines/SpinRite.vmwarevm/rawDiskFile). You will also need the path to the actual SpinRite. You will need to know the location of the Disk and the partitions you want to mount from the previous command, which in my case is /dev/disk2 1,2 which says it’s disk2 and both partitions 1 & 2. With your partitions known and visible by the rawdiskCreator tool you can create the vmdk file that refers to the physical hard disk you are trying to mount and make it available to the existing SpinRite VM you created earlier. What you should see next is your drive partitions… My particular drive was split into two partitions (#1 was very small and #2 made up the bulk of my 160G HD) Note: Ensure that the last entry /dev/disk# is changed to the drive you are targeting for raw access. Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmware-rawdiskCreator print /dev/disk# Next from the terminal run the following command to list the partitions that rawdiskCreator can see: In my case the 160GB HD came up as /dev/disk2 but your particular configuration may be different.
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I needed to create a Raw Disk vmdk to make the RawDisk accessible to the VM so I did the following:įrom a Mac terminal (I prefer iTerm) type:
Spinrite 6 usb boot pro#
I used a SATA to USB adapter and had to connect the drive to my Macbook Pro ensuring it was mounted to the Mac not the VM. Now the challenge was to get the physical hard drive mounted to the VM… Looking through the settings there was no way to get RAW access to a physical HD. It booted to a familiar screen without any issues. I then created a new MS-DOS based VM mounting the SpinRite.iso created from the SpinRite.exe file.
Spinrite 6 usb boot windows#
I created a spinrite.iso file from another Windows VM I use. With any luck it will operate just well enough to get your information to a readable state and backed up before you have complete hardware failure… Running SpinRite from a VM was a bit more involved to configure via VMWare Fusion on a Mac and I wasn’t completely sure it would work… so I thought I would share my experiences.
Spinrite 6 usb boot Pc#
FreeDOS has been incorporated into SpinRite distribution to allow it to boot to a bare-metal PC and mount any connected drives so you can exercise the individual bits of 1’s and 0’s stored on the drive, exercising it enough to get a magnetic drive in as good a working condition as the physical hardware will allow. Now for those of you who don’t know SpinRite was written in assembly and does very low level reads and writes against a computers magnetic mass storage drives. Without another PC handy I decided to assess my options… My daily laptop is a MacBook Pro, doesn’t (thankfully) have an internal 2.5″ SATA bay and is sealed tighter than the sub in the Hunt for Red October… So what’s a Mac user to do with an NTFS formatted magnetic HD that can’t be read, an old Laptop that won’t boot SpinRite, and no other PC’s within easy reach? Try to run SpinRite from a Virtual Machine on a Mac of course….
However, after creating a bootable CD and USB key with SpinRite for use on the 5 yo laptop neither one would work so I decided to take a different route. When I encounter a problem that needs extensive evaluation I would just run SpinRite on the x86 based PC from which the hard drive came. Computing and hard drive technology has changed a lot since then but they are still very much part of our day-to-day IT lives. The last time I actually used it was about 12 years ago over the course of several days to recover a failing HD. I recently found myself faced with a 2.5″ NTFS formatted laptop hard drive from a 5 year old laptop that wouldn’t cooperate and would constantly fail so I decided to try and recover what I could from the drive by running SpinRite, a great application from Steve Gibson of Gibson Research that I have used successfully many times in the past to recover damaged or unreadable magnetic based media.
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