This, in turn, allows dynamic head repositioning, whereby, when reading a faulty sector, the reading head is deliberately moved backwards and forwards many times, by varying amounts, in the hope that each time it returns to the sector, it may come to rest in a slightly different position. Another important feature is direct hardware-level access, whereby the drive's internal controller interacts directly with the program, rather than through the operating system. SpinRite is claimed by its developer to have certain unique features, such as disabling of disk write caching, disabling of auto-relocation, compatibility with disk compression, identification of the 'data-to-flux-reversal encoder-decoder' used in a drive, and separate testing of buffered and unbuffered disk read performance.

When a hard drive begins to fail due to mechanical faults, a program like SpinRite may extend its life long enough to carry out successful file recovery with other specialized software. However, if a hard drive's circuit board, drive motors or other mechanical parts are defective, or there is systemic file system corruption, SpinRite may be of little or no help. Gibson says his software was specifically designed to fix sector problems. In this respect SpinRite differs from most data recovery software, which usually provides (and recommends) an option to save the recovered data onto another disk, or onto a separate partition on the same disk. The data is then saved onto a new block on the same disk it cannot be saved elsewhere. When the program encounters a sector with errors that cannot be corrected by the disk drive's error-correcting code, it tries to read the sector up to 2000 times, in order to determine, by comparing the successive results, the most probable value of each bit. SpinRite attempts to recover data from hard disks with damaged portions that may not be readable via the operating system. It analyzes their contents and can refresh the magnetic disk surfaces to allow them to operate more reliably. SpinRite tests the data surfaces of writeable magnetic disks, including IDE, SATA, and floppy disks.

Drive interleave has long ceased to be an issue, but SpinRite continued to be developed, now using its remapping as a data recovery tool. SpinRite therefore gained its data recovery and testing capabilities as a side-effect of its original purpose. In changing the drive's interleave, SpinRite needed to be able to remap these physical defects into different logical sectors. At the time SpinRite was designed, hard drives often had a defect list printed on the nameplate, listing known bad sectors discovered at the factory.

SpinRite was originally written as a hard drive interleave tool.

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