[ale] what exactly does a long smart hdd test do?

[mike at trausch.us]

On 05/12/2012 10:29 AM, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:
> And, since he's the inventor of the SpinRite product, no one knows more
> about how that works than him.

Not at all.

My understanding is that it is a relatively small program.  It should be
possible (and perhaps I'll even go so far as to buy the software at some
point in the future and make the attempt to do so) to analyze the
software in order to determine how it works, right down to the calls it
makes to the BIOS.  Once compiled, the software cannot be decompiled,
but since it is executable software, the instructions which run on the
CPU itself can be determined.

(It could probably be decompiled if far more information is known about
it, but one would have to know everything about how the executable was
generated, and the only people that know that for commercial software
are the people that built it.)

	--- Mike

-- 
A man who reasons deliberately, manages it better after studying Logic
than he could before, if he is sincere about it and has common sense.
                                   --- Carveth Read, “Logic”

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