Spinrite has nothing to do with CD burning. It works specifically with
hard drives. Here's a more technical description:
When a hard drive is first manufactured it has nothing written to it,
not even the logical structures. (Logical structures include sectors,
sector gaps, checksums, etc.) In order to put these structures onto the
drive a low-level format must be performed. Normally when you format a
hard drive you're only putting logical structures on that drive which
are peculiar to the file format you're using; i.e. FAT, NTFS, etc.
However, sometimes a drive loses the low-level structures and the drive
has errors such as not being able to read a sector. When this happens
you need to perform a low-level format in order to re-write the
low-level logical structures. The only problem with this is that this
destroys all the data on the drive.
Enter Spinrite. Spinrite will perform a low-level format on your drive
without losing your data. All drives have a cylinder at the back-end of
the drive known as the diagnostic cylinder. Since all cylinders on a
drive have the same number of sectors per track and tracks per cylinder,
Spinrite copies the entire cylinder to the diagnostic cylinder, performs
the low-level format of the cylinder and then restores the data.
My use of the term "on-the-fly" was perhaps in error. John Durham is
correct: such an operation should not be performed while you are doing
other work on the system. I would not be surprised if Spinrite requires
you to boot to a non-multitasking OS such as DOS so it can perform its
duties. Depending on the hard drive, Spinrite can take days to complete
its task.
My apologies for any confusion I may have created by misusing "on-the-fly."
Vern
Madrachod@xxxxxxx wrote:
In a message dated 6/8/2004 7:51:35 PM Eastern Daylight Time, crbgfblab@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
Burning on the fly is basically burning from cd to cd *without* the source cd being cached to the hard drive. This is my understanding of it. If I'm incorrect, I'm sure someone will correct me shortly! :-)
Makes sense on cd to cd, but this is a program where I produce and edit music on I loaded onto the puter and then burn the final project onto cd.
Dale
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