SpinRite is a popular hard drive maintenance and data recovery software from Gibson Research Corporation, and costs $90 to own. While I haven’t extensively used the software, it has helped me recover data from hard drives when I thought the data was lost. It is a small application, and you also don’t need a powerful PC to use the application.
The once aspect of SpinRite that makes it different from other drive maintenance and data recovery tools is that you are required to boot up your computer using SpinRite to launch the application. SpinRite loads a copy of FreeDOS, detects the disks on your system and then allows you to perform specific scans of the disks.
Of course, if you need to scan a hard drive, you will usually need to connect it to either the IDE your SATA interface within your computer, which requires you to open up computer, and then connect the hard drive to the correct interface so the FreeDOS operating system can find your hard drive. In order for you to connect the drive to the USB port of you computer requires you to load the USB drivers within FreeDOS in order for the hard drive to be detected.
The alternative is to use a virtual system created by software such as VirtualBox to automatically setup and use a hard drive that is connected to a USB port. While the scanning may not be quite a fast, it is much easier to simply connect a hard drive to a USB port and then have SpinRite scan the hard drive in a virtual system.
I outline the steps that you need to follow to run SpinRite in VirtualBox.