Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Fun times with seagate tools, usb stick booting, no cdrom drive and grub4dos
So I have a mirroring RAID set up with 2x seagate 750GB disks and one of them has gone bad. I badly wanted to run the seagate diagnostic tools but was getting blocked at every chance. First of all the msi for the windows version refused to install on my xp system. Log file stuff I could find didnt show any errors :(. So I gave up on msi and tried to do the DOS version. Trouble its its a ISO for a CD ROM but I dont have a CD ROM installed in this computer right now. I wanted to boot from USB stick. Good luck. After a bunch of searching around I finally found a tool called multibootisos that will format a usb sick and make it bootable with grub4dos and also allow you to have several of its list of bootable isos installed on it. Trouble was that of course seagates iso is not on the list. In the end I left the seagate iso on my hard disk and just used the grub4dos that the multibootisos put on my usb stick to boot it. and it fuckin worked!
I had a bunch of stupid hangups and weird stuff before grub4dos would even boot anything for me off the usb stick. then once it did finally start seeing the usb stick files i realized i could probably just load it from the hard disk.
Heres what seemed to work in the end:
- format the usb stick as regular FAT (not FAT32). it will then hopefully have a better chance of getting formatted right by multibootisos
- connect usb stick, wait for it to pop up any windows then close them.
- run multibootisos. pick your stick drive letter (get it right!). choose memtest ISO (mainly because the grub commands that get set up for it will be a good reference for what we want to do) and have it download it. click next.
- when it tells you to disconnect and reconnect, after reconnecting make sure any windows that pop up from your usb stick are closed.
- click ok and finish up.
Ok now hopefully as long as your BIOS supports booting from USB-HDD you can reboot and have it boot into grub4dos off the stick.
Next step was loading the bloody seatools. Lol. Well I'd never used grub4dos before so I poked around at the help and did a little reading and looked at the example commands used to load the memtest ISO. Basically we do the same thing. Hit c to drop to the command prompt and type all this and then bam seatools came up on the screen. [My notes are in these square brackets. dont type those in.]
find
[this will list your hard drives]
ls (hd0,0)/
[show contents of this disk, is that the one with seatools? yeah? woot. then do...]
root (hd0,0)
[now the hd with seatools is the root device for grub4dos]
map --mem /thepath/totheISOfile.iso (hd32)
[something about telling it to load it in memory into virtual cdrom 1]
map --hook
root (hd32)
chainloader (hd32)
boot
[the rest of the stuff required to get it booted]
Link: http://www.pendrivelinux.com/boot-multiple-iso-from-usb-multiboot-usb/
Oh yeah, and I did confirm the seagate 750GB drive is bad, got a seatools error code now and everything. Lol.
I had a bunch of stupid hangups and weird stuff before grub4dos would even boot anything for me off the usb stick. then once it did finally start seeing the usb stick files i realized i could probably just load it from the hard disk.
Heres what seemed to work in the end:
- format the usb stick as regular FAT (not FAT32). it will then hopefully have a better chance of getting formatted right by multibootisos
- connect usb stick, wait for it to pop up any windows then close them.
- run multibootisos. pick your stick drive letter (get it right!). choose memtest ISO (mainly because the grub commands that get set up for it will be a good reference for what we want to do) and have it download it. click next.
- when it tells you to disconnect and reconnect, after reconnecting make sure any windows that pop up from your usb stick are closed.
- click ok and finish up.
Ok now hopefully as long as your BIOS supports booting from USB-HDD you can reboot and have it boot into grub4dos off the stick.
Next step was loading the bloody seatools. Lol. Well I'd never used grub4dos before so I poked around at the help and did a little reading and looked at the example commands used to load the memtest ISO. Basically we do the same thing. Hit c to drop to the command prompt and type all this and then bam seatools came up on the screen. [My notes are in these square brackets. dont type those in.]
find
[this will list your hard drives]
ls (hd0,0)/
[show contents of this disk, is that the one with seatools? yeah? woot. then do...]
root (hd0,0)
[now the hd with seatools is the root device for grub4dos]
map --mem /thepath/totheISOfile.iso (hd32)
[something about telling it to load it in memory into virtual cdrom 1]
map --hook
root (hd32)
chainloader (hd32)
boot
[the rest of the stuff required to get it booted]
Link: http://www.pendrivelinux.com/boot-multiple-iso-from-usb-multiboot-usb/
Oh yeah, and I did confirm the seagate 750GB drive is bad, got a seatools error code now and everything. Lol.
# posted by DeeLoaf @ 2:19 PM 
