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)