Create a bootable flash drive with SpinRite

[thewolfe]

I want to put SpinRite on a bootable flashdrive so I can run it.

I want to be able to use the flashdrive with SpinRite on XP & Win 7.

Do I create the bootable drive with Fat32 or NTFS?

Have looked on line on how to create it but any suggestions would be helpful.

 

[A Guy]

I purchased and downloaded the SpinRite program file. Now what?

SpinRite is a single program file that offers completely different services when it is run under Windows or DOS. It should first be run under Windows to choose and create some form of bootable media. You can choose to create a self-booting floppy diskette, a bootable CD-R ISO image file, or to prepare a USB flash drive or other bootable device for booting.

Then, when the media prepared by the Windows-side of SpinRite is booted, the FreeDOS operating system included within SpinRite will boot, and it will, in turn, start SpinRite to begin performing data recovery, maintenance, and repair.

So . . . after you download the SpinRite.exe program, run it under Windows to have it create a bootable media format of your choice. Then shutdown and restart the target system, booting it with the SpinRite bootable media to start the FreeDOS operating system which will automatically run SpinRite under FreeDOS.

How do I make a bootable USB thumb drive??

Past users have had mixed success with USB drive booting. Older flash drives seem to be resistant, and older BIOSes may not support booting from USB devices. But in both cases, virtually all newer drives and systems do and will.

If your system can boot a USB device, and your USB device is bootable, we can offer some tips, tricks, and pointers:

Hewlett Packard (HP) makes an easy-to-use utility called “HP USB Disk Format Tool”, which includes a "Create a DOS Startup Disk" option. It's freely available from: HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool - v2.1.8 Download - EXTREME Overclocking along with the Windows 98/DOS boot files.

Run the HP tool, pointing it at the directory where you unzipped the DOS boot files, and it will automatically build a bootable DOS USB drive using those files. Next, copy your original SPINRITE.EXE file onto the root directory of your USB drive. Once done, reboot the system with your BIOS configured to boot from USB drives. At the DOS prompt, type spinrite to start SpinRite.

Note that this also has the advantage of using real Microsoft MS-DOS files rather than the “FreeDOS” files which accompany SpinRite. The real, original MS-DOS may operate more consistently on less compatible systems.

Source

Good luck

A Guy

 

[Marzipan]

For anyone else who reads this and may be wondering, the answer is FAT32