Hi there. Maybe someone is interested in how to run Spinrite booting from a mac. I managed to boot it and scan my internal drive. It went flawless but there are some restrictions.
the problem when trying to boot spinrite from a cd or usb drive is, that there is no keyboard access after starting the prog. there are two different reasons for that. at first you have to get hold of a boot image that provides you with ms-dos command line. i used win98 boot image and booted this from cd. there are loads of errors concernig ram drive stuff and himem.sys failing to load, but that’s unimportant. the best thing is to press shift+f5 on the boot menu, skipping the whole mess. you’ll notice that your keyboard layout is the standard u.s. – it’s really important not to execute the keyb command to switch to your countrys codepage, this is what kills the keyboard access in the first place. after establishing command line access make sure you attached a usb flash drive with the spinrite.exe on it before booting up. if done properly you can access the usb drive juct by typing “c:” you may ask, why not burn the spinrite executable right on the cd and access it from there. this has to do with the ability to write log files. log files are most important, because you won’t be able to run spinrite just like that. the program has it’s own routine to address your computers hardware. it overrides the bios. that’s the reason, why you still will not have acces to your macs keyboard after launching spinrite. the solution is to use spinrite’s command line switches and turn it into auto mode. this will make it work without any user input during the process. at first type “spinrite list” this will give you an overview of all the computers partitions. your mac drive and all its partitions are there. i found mine under “drive 0″ this is what you need to specify. for example, doing a scan on drive 0 using level 4 you have to type “spinrite auto drive 0 level 4″ very easy.
attention!: after starting the process there is no way to stop until the task is finished, since you have no keyboard access within the program you cannot abort the process. the only way to get out of spinrite is to turn of your mac. which may result in data loss, if done during a scan operation. so be careful when selecting the drive and level. be sure you make the right selection, otherwise you have to wait until the program finished the task and start over again. well, this sounds complicated, but in fact it’s really easy and it saved me loads of trouble, since there is no need to remove the mac drive and attach it to a pc to scan it. it worked perfect. after the scan is completed restart and look for the spinrite.log on your usb device. there is all the information about found errors and stuff. have a nice day.

Couldn’t you just pull the drive and hook it up to a windows machine and run it there?

Who would know the answer to this? Maybe on the VirtualBox forums…I’m off to ask…

But sadly, I could not get VirtualBox working. As Russ said, the -register parameter was invalid. But even without that, I got a VERR_RESOURCE_BUSY error. I could not unmount the internal drive though. (I cannot think of what is using it.)

A newer version of VirtualBox break this, or what is wrong?

Thanks for any help!

1. On the command to make the virtual disk for virtualbox, I got an error saying “-register” was an unrecognized option, i took it out, it’s working so far without that.

2. The OS would consistently try to mount the internal HD, and this gave errors in virtualbox, and via the command line when trying to use the hard drive. So i would have to go to disk utility and unmount the drive. Then virtualbox could access it.

Hope that helps someone.

Here’s hoping Mr Gibson can bring SpinRite to us Mac users sometime…

Thanks!
-russ