A totally new SpinRite

Rather than loading the owner's guide down with lots of " this is what you just bought and let us tell you how wonderful it is " propaganda, we fought to keep it concise, non-intimidating, and solution directed. Many of SpinRite 3.1's initial users have reported that they love the guide's brevity. But it explains nothing about how and what SpinRite does. So we created this " under the hood " technical brief to explain SpinRite. .. what it is, what it does, and how it works. We are, like many software developers, philosophically opposed to the U.S. patent system's too-liberal granting of software intellectual property rights. We feel that what is being called an " invention " is often little more than clever engineering, and as a result innovation is being stifled rather than promoted. However, as a small software publisher in a land of software giants, we would be foolish to give up the same protection for our software that everyone else is attaining. In a climate which condones (and increasingly expects) " reverse engineering, " securing patent protection could easily separate the survivors from the dead benefactors. Since many of the new and completely unique technologies that were developed for SpinRite 3 easily qualify as " inventions " within the current definition, we are actively pursuing all means of securing rights in the intellectual property we have created. Much of what is disclosed within these pages is the subject of extensive ongoing patent acquisition. SpinRite II was aging in an industry that takes no prisoners. There had been so much evolution since those days of mis-interleaved, 17-sector, MFM drives, that we knew it was time for some serious change. The tremendous success of IDE hard disk drives with their standardized Western Digital AT-compatible hardware, meant that for the first time we could interface directly with the controller and drive hardware to completely circumvent the limitations of the system's motherboard BIOS. SpinRite's users had long been asking for features that could not be readily shoehorned into the framework of SpinRite II, and I had been fiddling around with a number of intriguing ideas relating to recovering data from completely unreadable sectors. So we made the hard decision to take everything we'd learned from SpinRite II, but scrap its code and start anew with three goals: We wanted to incorporate years of field experience and user suggestions into an …