Saturday, June 28, 2008

Samsung ESTOOL Drive Diagnostic Does Nothing (here's why)

Or does it?

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/utilities/ES_Tool.html

I have been trying to get the ESTOOL hard drive diagnostic program to work for over a day now, and just figured out the problem. The bootable floppy disk seems to work. It lets me auto detect and select my Samsung hard drive. It lets me see information about the drive and its settings. When I choose "Drive Diagnostic," it asks how many loops to run, and when I hit enter (defaulting to 1), I end up back at the main menu.

Ends up that the ESTOOLS boot floppy disk MUST NOT BE WRITE PROTECTED ! It wants to write a status log to the disk, but fails silently if the disk can't be written to. I'd guess that if the floppy disk were full, the same silent error would occur. So, to save yourself the grief I went through, don't lock the disk, and make sure there is at least 10K for log files (they are actually less than 5K each).

Would have been nice if the program told me what the problem was !!!
(I thought it was that my chipset was Nvidia, which was the problem with another vendor's hard drive diagnostic toolset)

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I cant get estool to work, on a floppy its a no show and on a cdrom it gives an error when I try to boot the Cdrom I burnes Estool on

AAron nAAs said...

The floppy should boot regardless of any other settings, or even any HDs connected. Once I had to recreate the floppy disk to get it to work. Try that, and make sure you've got boot from floppy prioritized in BIOS.

Post, or search for, the CD-ROM boot error if you would like to find a solution.

Unknown said...

Thank you -so- much! I had no luck running the program from CD (No FDD), and when I read your blog I just copied it to a Ramdrive et violĂ ! Hours of grief spared...