My fileserver has 10 disks in a linear setup (JBOD, BIG, whatever you want to call it). I’ve been using software raid on Linux to do this. Today, one of the drives seemed to fail, giving me a read-only filesystem. Without too much experience in the field, I assume this harddrive is on it’s way out. I did a simple disk info and found it was 1 of 3 Samsung drives… Which one though? And is it really faulty?
I downloaded a utility from Samsung that lets you run a disk diagnostic, which would hopefully give me an answer to that question. However, I had to choose between a bootable CD and a floppy, neither of which works for me since I don’t have an optical drive or a floppy drive in the fileserver. So! Here’s how I made a bootable USB thumb drive:
Note: This will only give you a bootable MS DOS drive.
- Download the “HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool” from bootdisk.com (it’s under “method 2″, first link, currently version 2.0.6)
- Install the app.
- You will need the files from a MS DOS boot floppy. You can get plenty of different versions from bootdisk.com. I chose the Windows 98 OEM version.
- Most of these will want to write straight to a floppy (to get the boot sector right). If you’re like me and a don’t have a floppy drive anymore, you can download and run an awesome little app called Virtual Floppy Drive. This will emulate a floppy drive on your windows box. Pretty awesome for stuff like this.
- Create the floppy using the downloaded boot disk creator.
- Insert an appropriate USB thumb drive into the system. I’ve tried different drives and it handles most of them just fine. This time I used a simple MicroSD => USB adapter and a small memory card.
- Run the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool thingy, select your USB device, select FAT as the file system, choose a quick format and to create a DOS startup disk. Browse to your (virtual?) floppy drive and click OK, then Start.
- When it’s done, feel free to copy any applications you want to run from it over to the thumb drive. I downloaded the bootable CD diagnostics from Samsung, opened the ISO file and extracted the application files onto my thumb drive.
- Plug it into whatever system you want to boot, be sure to set the BIOS to boot from it and you should be good to go
Hope this helps someone, it took me a little while to figure this out a while ago and figured I’d write a small howto.
