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Wednesday 14 August 2019

Hurrah for DOS

I have a Western Digital 200 gb drive that I suspect of being bad, so I wanted to test it. The Seagate drive test didnt help, nor the Maxtor. Obviously, I need a Western Digital drive test.

Google to the rescue; I easily found DOSDLG.exe. But it has to run under Dos.

So I burned it to a CD, and burned Freedos to a CD. I booted from the Freedos CD, and swapped the CDs.

Freedos thought that the Freedos CD was still in place.

Several minutes later, I decided that I wasn't going to be able to change its mind. And I couldn't add the WD diags to that CD, because it was burned as an iso.

So I dug out an old 3 1/2 floppy drive (remember those?) to connect to the test computer, and I found an old bootable Dos disk, and that booted up OK.

But then that didn't recognised the CD drive which had the WD diags on. So I thought, OK, I have to copy the WD Diags to a floppy, but I don't have a working computer with a floppy drive; I stopped using floppies yonks ago. So, I thought, no problem, I'll take a computer apart and add a floppy drive.

This was getting ridiculous. You know the situation where you're trying to solve a small problem, but to do that you have to solve a bigger problem, which entails solving an even bigger problem ...

So I stopped and had a think.

USB!

So I formatted a USB drive to FAT-32, and installed Dos on it using Rufus.exe (find it with Google). Then I copied the WD diags program to it. I told the test computer to boot from the USB drive, which it did, and then I was able to run the WD diagnostics program.

Result!


2 comments:

  1. Well, was the WD drive bad, or did you forget that was why you Rube Goldberg'ed your day away?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes. It was bad.

    But it's the journey, not the destination.

    ReplyDelete