I am trying to set up a computer to handle multiple VM's, each running SpinRite on a single drive attached to the mother board. I have that part all working, in the sense that SpinRite starts up and detects the physical disk I've passed through to it from Server 2008 R2. The issue is that SpinRite believes the VM is reporting the disks size incorrectly so it won't run. Do VM's do things to the reporting of passed through disks that could account for this?

Something like spinrite is going to use very low level SCSI access commands to perform functions on the connected disk. I highly doubt these will pass through. You could try loading the version of storport here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978000 to get a better look at what's going on. Another option, if you have access to checked windows builds is to load the checked build and do some live debugging.J

thanks very much. I was kinda afraid of this. It's a shame: with the size of drives today, a level 4 SpinRite can take 200+ hours. Having the ability to have one computer spinrite multiple drives would certainly improve efficiency a lot. Oh well, c'est la vie.

OMG. I got it working. It turns out that it was the drive itself that was giving grief to SpinRite — it was set up as GPT, which SpinRite doesn't (yet) support. I used diskpart clean to wipe the drive and I now have 3 drives being SpinRited, each drive in it's own VM on a single Server 2008r2 install. This is very cool.

So here is my question......why use spinrite? I used this software say back in 1992? You could make your MFM or RLL drive run faster/better with it. What does it do for you today?Thanks, -Lindy

Sorry to revive this ancient thread, but I've just been trying the same thing with hyper-v and spinrite myself. Your post here really helped. Would you recommend unchecking "Enable write caching on the device" in Disk Management on the host? I have a problem losing keyboard control in the guest after a while, not a huge problem though. GRC recommended creating an MS-DOS boot disk and running spinrite from that instead of that, but that has not helped. Any other recommendations for running spinrite in a VM? Thanks!