Alternatives to SpinRite for all platforms with any license

  • HDD Regenerator

    HDD Regenerator is a unique program for regeneration of physically damaged hard disk drives. It does not hide bad sectors, it really restores them!.

    • Discontinued The program is no longer updated since 2011, but it supports Windows 10 and can be still bought from the official website.

    Commercial $ $ $ Windows

    Portable Add a feature

    HDD Regenerator icon

  • Victoria

    Victoria - An experimental program to work with HDD. Victoria is a small application designed to assess performance, test and perform minor repairs to your IDE...

    • It tries to recover bad sector and reads smart data It is faster than SpinRite and gives you an option to select part of the drive that you wish to scan or repair Guest • Jun 2017 • 1 agrees and 0 disagrees Disagree   Agree

    Free Windows

    Portable Support for S.M.A.R.T. data Add a feature

    Victoria icon

  • MHDD

    MHDD is the most popular freeware program for low-level HDD diagnostics. MHDD supports these interfaces: IDE, Serial ATA, SCSI. Also there is a possibility to access...

    • Discontinued Last version 4.6 was released in 2005. See http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/mhdd_changelog.en.html

    Free Windows

    Hardware Monitoring Portable Support for S.M.A.R.T. data Add a feature

    MHDD icon

  • DRevitalize

    DRevitalize is a program that repairs bad sectors (physical defects) on popular magnetic media (hard drives and also floppy drives to some extent) by generating a...

    Commercial Windows MS-DOS

    Recover lost data Add a feature

    DRevitalize icon

  • DiskFresh

     DiskFresh is a simple yet powerful tool that can refresh your hard disk signal without changing its data by reading and writing each sector and hence making your...

    Free Personal Windows

    No features added Add a feature

    DiskFresh icon

Platforms

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License

SpinRite Comments

Comment by newmania
about SpinRite · Jun 2011 · Helpful Not helpful 1 Helpful Report as spam

Steve Gibson is a real craftsman and he does commercial software right: no DRM, very flexible and simple license.

reply

Comment by Xeogin
about SpinRite · Jun 2011 · Helpful Not helpful Report as spam

Oh how I wish there was a legal, free substitute for this software, it's the reason why I found this site.

reply
kalyok · Aug 2013

Xeogin, it all depends on which part of the program you need. I found useful one option, kind of unique to SpinRite - refresh HDD surface, which is read and rewrite the same data back on the HDD. This procedure, done every once in a while, enhances data signal and prevents data loss due to normal/natural demagnetizing of the platter surface. Well, I found one free software that replaces this exact function: DiskFresh by Puran Software. However DiskFresh is better than SpinRite because it runs in background while OS is live, and it doesn't do too many extra moves, as compared to SpinRite. Well, not everything is positive - DiskFresh doesn't recover data, doesn't repair bad sectors (but does report them), cannot show S.M.A.R.T. data, etc., but for that I have other free utilities: Victoria, HDAT2, HDSDOS and many more others to choose from, that all together cost $89 less, that SpinRite. :)

Good luck!