cli

If you don't have the luxury of having a dedicated machine to run SpinRite to scan hardrives, perhaps this recipe will help you. It only scans drives through the USB interface, which is (at least) one layer removed from the ATA layer, but its better than nothing, and anecdotely it seems to work.

Since the virtual machine requires access to the raw usb decices, you'll probably need to run the following recipe as a privilaged user, i.e. root.