SpinRite is a computer program for scanning magnetic data storage devices such as hard disks, recovering data from them and refreshing their surfaces. The first version was released in 1987 by Steve Gibson. The current version, 6.0, (available ) was released in 2004. SpinRite is run from a bootable medium (such as a CD, DVD or USB memory stick) on a PC-compatible computer, allowing it to scan a computer's hard drive and file system. It does not depend on the operating system installed on the computer. History SpinRite was originally written as a hard drive interleave tool. 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. In changing the drive's interleave, SpinRite needed to be able to remap these physical defects into different logical sectors. SpinRite therefore gained its data recovery and testing capabilities as a side-effect of its original purpose. Drive interleave has long ceased to be an issue, but SpinRite continued to be developed, now using its remapping as a data recovery tool. Features SpinRite tests the data surfaces of writeable magnetic disks, including IDE, SATA, and floppy disks. It analyzes their contents and can refresh the magnetic disk surfaces to allow them to operate more reliably. SpinRite attempts to recover data from hard disks with damaged portions that may not be readable via the operating system. 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. The data is then saved onto a new block on the same disk; it cannot be saved elsewhere. 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. Gibson says his software was specifically designed to fix sector problems. 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. 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