Tech Notes

Tech Note #20130001

The need to run disk diagnostic programs has never been higher and yet, the ability to do so has been significantly impacted on quite a few newer motherboards with the omission of floppy disk controllers. Many of the disk diagnostic programs are only available from the disk manufacturers in DOS form, to be copied onto a floppy disk, thereby precluding their use on a motherboard with no floppy. A method is described herein for creating a bootable CD that can be used to run any of the DOS-based disk diagnostic programs on such a motherboard.

Problem Description:

With the switch to vertical recording technologies by the world's hard disk manufacturers, as well as the never-ending the push to lower the cost per megabyte of disk storage, it seems that the probability of encountering a bad disk drive has increased dramatically. Whether it is due to less-than-stellar quality control or just inherant in the technology itself, the liklihood of encountering a DOA or seriously failing disk drive is much greater now than it was even a few years ago.

Conversely, as disk drives become less reliable, the need for reliability has never been higher. On a one or two terabyte drive, the potential for a catastrophic data loss that can do some real harm is something to be avoided at all costs. One way this can be done is to exercise new disk drives, using a disk diagnostic program, for several hours or days, before the drive is installed in a system. This culls out the early failures and DOA drives.

Heaven forbid that a disk failure does occur but when it does it is also of paramount importance that a disk diagnostic be run to either assist in recovering the data or, at the very least, provide supporting evidence for a warranty claim. Luckily, all of the disk drive manufacturers provide disk diagnostic programs that are prepared to exercise and test their brand of disk drives.

If you are lucky, your disk drive manufacturer will provide you with an ISO image of a bootable CD that can be used to boot and run the diagnostic program on any system with a CD drive. Often, however, the hard disk diagnostic program is a simple DOS program which is meant to be copied onto a floppy disk with a bootable copy of DOS on it. Western Digital's Data Lifeguard is such an example. The idea is that the floppy disk is booted into DOS, which then runs the disk diagnostic program. The program is free to manipulate the disk drives, without any kind of interference by the system's OS, from a known environment (i.e. DOS). This way it stands the best chance of finding any and all disk errors.

That's a splendid idea but what if your system's motherboard has no floppy disk controller on it? Such a situation is becoming a much more likely scenario, as floppy disk usage and technology fades into the mists of antiquity. A better solution would be if a bootable CD was available that could be used to boot and run the disk diagnostics, since you can always connect an IDE or SATA CD drive to the motherboard.

Problem Resolution:

This note describes how to construct a bootable CD that contains a copy of the FreeDOS operating system and Western Digital's Data Lifeguard disk diagnostic program. Since Data Lifeguard will only operate on Western Digital drives, you will need a similar bootable CD for any other manufacturer's drives that you own, but WD manufactures a good proportion of all of the world's disk drives so building this particular CD will get you a long way towards having the tools you need for testing and diagnosing disk drives.

The fist step is to obtain a copy of WD's hard drive diagnostics program, Data Lifeguard, from their Web page. Download the zip file, unzip it and get the program named dlgdiag5.exe (or whatever its name is).

The second step is to proceed to the FreeDOS Ripcord BootDisk page and fetch a copy of the FreeDOS OEM CD Disk Builder Assistant, either from that page or directly from the this link to the OEM CD Disk Builder Assistant zip file.

You then need to unzip the FDOEMCD.builder.zip file to create the FDOEMCD subdirectory tree in a directory of your choosing.

Copy the unzipped dlgdiag5.exe to the CDROOT subdirectory which will be found under the FDOEMCD subdirectory. Using your favorite text editor, change the AUTORUN.BAT file in the CDROOT subdirectory to invoke the WD disk diagnostics program:


@echo OFF
cls
echo FreeDOS OEM Bootable CD-ROM!
dlgdiag5

Start a command prompt and change into FDOEMCD builder directory. Generate the new ISO image by running makeiso.bat. You can rename the ISO image that results (fdoem.iso) to something more memorable or you can just keep it the way it is.

Whether you keep the file name as fdoem.iso or rename it to something else, burn the ISO image into the CD using your normal CD writing software. You should now be able to boot from the CD and give it a try with one of your Western Digital disks.