SpinRite attempts to recover data from drives that the operating system cannot read. It analyzes their contents and can refresh the magnetic disk surfaces or flash memory storage to allow them to operate more reliably. SpinRite tests the data surfaces of writeable magnetic disks, including IDE, SATA, and floppy disks, plus SSD Solid State Drives. 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. It does not depend on the operating system installed on the computer. SpinRite is run from a bootable medium (such as a CD, DVD or USB flash drive) on a PC-compatible computer, allowing it to scan a computer's storage medium. , with ongoing development open to the public at The current version, 6.0, (available as of January 2023 ) was released in 2004. The first version was released in 1987 by Steve Gibson. SpinRite is a computer program for scanning RAS Random Access Storage devices such as hard disks, reading and rewriting data using proprietary programming methods to resolve and retrieve data that is unreadable by DOS or Windows. Included FreeDOS (doesn't use OS of host PC)Ġ.169 MB executable, 1.40 MB bootable disk image with FreeDOS OS

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