This is a text-only version of the following page on https://raymii.org:

This is a text-only version of the following page on https://raymii.org:
---
Title : Spinrite 6.0 on UEFI and an NVMe SSD drive
Author : Remy van Elst
Date : 03-11-2022 21:00
URL : https://raymii.org/s/blog/Spinrite_6.0_on_UEFI_and_NVMe_ssd_drives.html
Format : Markdown/HTML
---

![spinrite licensed][5]

[Spinrite][2] is a hard drive recovery and maintenance utility written by
Steve Gibson from [Gibson Research Corporation][3]. It is marketed on the
[Security Now][4] TWiT podcast which I often listen to. I have bought a copy
of it and sometimes use it on solid state disks or [SD cards][1]. Spinrite
6.0 is written is assembly language and runs on top of MS-DOS or FreeDOS,
using the BIOS. UEFI is not supported and neither are NVMe drives. This post
will show you how to run Spinrite 6.0 on such a system anyway, using a modern
linux live USB drive that can boot on UEFI only system and VirtualBox,
exposing the NVMe disk as a SATA drive.

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This post is neither sponsored nor endorsed by GRC, just some random person
online figuring stuff out. Continue on with caution, you might inadvertently
loose important data. **Make sure you have a working (and regularly tested)
backup.**

Some people claim it is snake oil, or that `badblocks` or `ddrescue` are better
or that a failing drive shouldn't be stressed more, In my humble opinion
Spinrite is useful in some cases and I have had it make drives usable again
that were failing.

Once I helped a family member who had no backup of a brand new, 4 week old
laptop which would often blue-screen after a few minutes while being
extremely slow. Further troubleshooting revealed that the blue screens were
related to disk issues. Running Spinrite on level 2(read everything and allow
the drive controller to mark sectors as bad, hopefully relocating the data)
made all those problems to away. That laptop's drive continued to work for
nearly 5 years until the laptop was replaced, even though I advised them to
replace the drive right away under warranty. I did of course set them up with
a backup.

I also often use Spinrite to "fix" cheap [SD cards][1] that fail in Raspberry
Pi's or other SBC's. Often that works, sometimes the card is too far gone.

The best use of Spinrite is making sure you don't need it. Have a backup system
in place and test it regularly, including off-site and offline backups.

But if you do want to run it, you might run into issues with modern hardware.

### Spinrite 6.0 on a UEFI only system

If you have a system that can boot via the BIOS (legacy boot) and set the SATA
controller to AHCI, that is your best bet, it will probably run Spinrite just
fine. My most recent work machine however is a UEFI only system with no
option to set the disk mode to AHCI. It has a legacy boot option, but that
fails to boot Spinrite via FreeDOS (erroring out with `Invalid Opcode at 000x
yyzz...`). Making an actual MS-DOS live disk does let it boot up, but when it is
enumerating the drives, it reboots the machine. The drives are two NVMe SSD disks.

The process I used to run Spinrite was to boot up a Debian linux derivative
(Antix 22) that supports UEFI only systems and install VirtualBox in that
live environment. VirtualBox can pass through actual drives as other storage
types (a SATA drive as IDE for example), which Spinrite then can scan.

You will need 2 USB drives. One to boot from and one to put the Spinrite
ISO on.

### Creating the Live USB drive

I choose [Antix][6] because that is a small ISO and I only had a 4 GB USB
drive at that moment. I also run Antix on a few older machines here, it works
quick and snappy. Any Debian derivative probably works. [Download][6] the 64
bit version since VirtualBox does not have a modern 32 bit version in the
repositories.

Use [Rufus][7] to write that linux ISO to your USB drive, make sure to give it
some persistent storage space.

On the Windows machine where you ran Rufus, open up your copy of Spinrite and
save an ISO file:

![spinrite ISO][9]

Put that ISO file on the other USB drive and boot your machine from the
Linux Live USB drive.

### Installing and configuring VirtualBox

Once booted up, fire up a terminal and install VirtualBox using the
following command:

sudo apt install virtualbox-*

In my case, both a DKMS (kernel driver) and a UI (`virtualbox-qt`) were
installed and a reboot was not required.

Fire up VirtualBox via the terminal, using `sudo` to launch it as root. This
is needed for the raw disk access:

sudo virtualbox

Create a new Virtual machine and follow the wizard. Select DOS as the
operating system. Create a new virtual disk of 2 GB and add the Sprite ISO
to the VM. After the wizard finishes, open the settings and make sure only
the ISO image is selected as boot option.

Fire up the VM to test that Spinrite boots and sees your small 2 GB disk. Turn
the VM off.

Continue on exposing your actual NVMe disk as an image file to VirtualBox.

### Adding the raw disk

To pass through the NVMe drive, you must use the following command
to [create a special disk file VirtualBox can use][10]:

sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename
nvme0.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/nmve0n1

The [VirtualBox manual has a big red warning][10]:

> **Raw hard disk access is for expert users only. Incorrect use or use of an
outdated configuration can lead to total loss of data on the physical
disk. Most importantly, do not attempt to boot the partition with the
currently running host operating system in a guest. This will lead to
severe data corruption.**

Since we're booted from a Live USB drive, the only thing you need to double
check is the boot devices in VirtualBox, make sure not to select the disk
there, only the ISO file containing Spinrite.

The commands in the manual differ from the commands above, the newer versions
use this command syntax:

VBoxManage createmedium disk --filename
nvme0.vmdk --format=VMDK --variant RawDisk --property
RawDrive=/dev/nvme0n1

The version of VirtualBox in the Debian repository is older which is why I
used the old syntax.

In the Virtual machine settings, to to Storage and use the green PLUS button
at the bottom to add a SATA controller (or IDE). Select that controller and
click the green PLUS button on the disk symbol (on that line, next to the
optical disk image):

![virtualbox sata][11]

Use the media manager to select the NVMe disk file you just created. I have
two NVMe disks in this machine, but added just one at a time to run Spinrite.
This is how my VirtualBox storage settings look:

![virtualbox storage][12]

**Make sure that the raw disk image is not selected in the boot options.**

Fire up the virtual machine again, let Spinrite boot up and if all went well,
you should now be able to select your NVMe disk. Below is a screenshot of
Spinrite running in VirtualBox on an 256 GB NVMe SSD drive, on a machine
without a classic BIOS or legacy boot option:

![spinrite running][13]

This is the output of my regular Linux installation, `nvme list`, showing the 2 drives:

$ sudo nvme list
Node Generic SN Model Namespace Usage Format FW Rev
--------------------- --------------------- -------------------- ---------------------------------------- --------- -------------------------- ---------------- --------
/dev/nvme1n1 /dev/ng1n1 6[..........]S KXG50ZNV256G TOSHIBA 1 256.06 GB / 256.06 GB 512 B + 0 B AAHA4102
/dev/nvme0n1 /dev/ng0n1 S[...........]B Samsung SSD 970 EVO 1TB 1 796.93 GB / 1.00 TB 512 B + 0 B 2B2QEXE7

The entire Antix Linux live environment (running at a reduced resolution due
to the machine also having an NVidia graphics card) looks like this:

![entire vm][8]

After Spinrite finished, I shut down the machine and rebooted into the regular
linux running on it. That has an encrypted disk, using `dm-crypt` and lvm, but
with `trim` enabled and the recent [cloudflare additions to linux disk
encryption][14] to speed things up. Full disk encryption is rather slow
without that and over time, not running trim reduces the speed even more,
especially when the disk gets full. Running Spinrite also helps with
(my perceived feeling of) increasing the snappiness of the machine.

Do note that I'm not sure if this is a supported way of running Spinrite and
that it might delete all your data. I have not had data loss or issues with
exposing my raw NVMe disk as an IDE or SATA disk via VirtualBox, but I might
have just been lucky.

Spinrite 6.1 is on the way, which will be faster because it doesn't use the
BIOS for disk access anymore. It will also support disks larger than 2 TB,
but UEFI or NVMe support are not included. Those are planned for later
versions.

Before going the VirtualBox route, I tried to use KVM via `virt-manager` but
that failed to pass through the NVMe drive. First it errored on the cache
mode, but none of the methods worked (`writeback`, etc), then after messing
around I received a few more errors. VirtualBox worked instantly without
issues, but I did try kvm first because I thought that virtualbox required a
reboot after installing, which wasn't the case after all.

[1]: /s/blog/Broken_Corrupted_Raspberry_Pi_SD_Card.html
[2]: https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
[3]: https://grc.com
[4]: https://twit.tv/shows/security-now
[5]: /s/inc/img/sr-1.png
[6]: https://antixlinux.com/download/
[7]: https://rufus.ie
[8]: /s/inc/img/sr-2.png
[9]: /s/inc/img/sr-3.png
[10]: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#rawdisk
[11]: /s/inc/img/sr-4.png
[12]: /s/inc/img/sr-5.png
[13]: /s/inc/img/sr-6.png
[14]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221103191933/https://blog.cloudflare.com/speeding-up-linux-disk-encryption/

---

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