#spinrite

Omg you guys Rossy has Spinrite mill ends!

Work is proceeding nicely on SpinRite. I want to make the testing phase as easy as possible for those who are interested in participating. Since SpinTest, like SpinRite, boots and runs on DOS, I've prepared a new version of SpinRite's Windows app which will be able to prepare boot media, installing a bootable system into a diskette or a USB thumb drive, or create an ISO file for burning to an optical disc. So that now exists. I'm currently working to get the first release of SpinTest ready for packaging in its boot-prep installer. So I hope that for next week's podcast I'll have some sense for how compatible this first AHCI driver code that I have written and which is working is across all of our testers' motherboards. It turns out that there were some people having a problem with the himem.sys driver that FreeDOS uses on some systems. And I had already, back in 2013, experimented with writing my own. So I've decided that's the approach I'll take for the sake of compatibility. And so I'm just now in the process. I created a little ram.exe utility that everyone is playing with right now. It's 1,224 bytes long, and it enumerates all of the RAM available from zero to the 1GB boundary in any machine that it's run on under DOS. They're all having fun with that. I'm getting a lot of good feedback. I'll incorporate that into SpinTest. So anyway, it's all going really well. And it just feels, Leo, it feels so good to be working on SpinRite.