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Filed on I recently tried to run SpinRite on a large SATA disk. It booted OK and I was able to select the partitions and choose the SpinRite run level, but as soon as it tried to start the scan, it printed an "Invalid Opcode" error followed by a bunch of register addresses or memory locations. This was on the "Selecting Drive For Use" screen. SpinRite (and the system) was locked up at that point.
It turned out to be an easy fix: I just had to go into the BIOS, to the SATA mode setting, and change it from IDE to AHCI. When I did this and then booted SpinRite again, I noticed that a bunch of the drive fields (hardware addrs, hardware irq, etc) were now listed as "unknown", but SpinRite was able to scan the disk now.