IDE Hard Drive Diagnostics Machine

[deanj20]

Hey Computer Forum,

I have a customer who is in the arcade machine business. He informed me the other day that when a machine fails, he first sent the hard drives from the machines off to have them tested for errors before he starts diagnosing the main board. He's pretty smart about hardware, and very handy with a soldering iron, but he just doesn't know much about computers in general.

I asked if I could see one of the drives, and I was surprised to see that it was a regular every-day IDE hard drive. I told him I could check the disk for errors for a fraction of the cost (they were charging like $170 where he shipped it). After talking with him further, we've decided to build a machine used especially for checking hard drives.

I know that the Ultimate Boot CD has just about every hard drive manufacturers utility built-in. I was thinking I could put the image of the UBCD on one partition and Windows XP on another, and have the option to boot to one or the other when the computer comes on. I could buy a one of these and a couple of these and get them outside the case somehow to make it easy to hook up drives to be tested.

What do you guys think? Is there a better way to build a 'hard drive testing machine'? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!
- Jeremy

 

[Cromewell]

You generally can't hot swap a drive attached by an old IDE ribbon, wouldn't it be simpler to just get an enclosure and just install the windows version of the tools? If powering down the test system when he wants to swap drives is fine then your idea should work, getting the external power may be difficult if it's not run with at least the side panel open.

 

[deanj20]

You generally can't hot swap a drive attached by an old IDE ribbon, wouldn't it be simpler to just get an enclosure and just install the windows version of the tools? If powering down the test system when he wants to swap drives is fine then your idea should work, getting the external power may be difficult if it's not run with at least the side panel open.

Well, I'm afraid that there won't be a Windows version of the tools for all of the HDDs.

An IDE to USB adapter would be ideal, only many manufacturer's diagnostics tools will not scan USB for compatible drives - only IDE ports.

No need to hot swap - only one drive will be tested at a time, only as needed - probably no more than a few times a week. The reason I want Windows installed on the computer is in case there is no utility for a particular drive on the UBCD, in which case he could d/l a Windows tool online, or just scan it with Scandisk, etc.

I think getting power to the drive should be no problem using a couple of extensions like the ones in the second link - although I wish I could just find one long single extension - like 3' - instead of having to use several Y-adapters - I'm afraid I'll take a power cut, but hopefully it will work out.

 

[Achenar123]

An IDE to USB adapter would be ideal, only many manufacturer's diagnostics tools will not scan USB for compatible drives - only IDE ports.

It's been several years since I've touched IDE so my memory is a bit foggy. I seem to recall once testing a friends ide external enclosure. Spinrite had problems but seagate tools from dos worked.

I might be mistaken....

 

[deanj20]

OK - I finally got it going my way - this is how I

Install UBCD to Hard Drive and Multi-boot with UBCD to build an IDE Hard Drive Diagnostics Machine
(^^for search engine purposes^^)

Anyway, first I installed Windows XP. On the install screen, I deleted the existing partition(s), and created a new one, NTFS, for XP. I used 70GB of the 80GB available (70000MB).

After I got XP installed and patched/updated/etc, I then downloaded the UBCD ISO file. Then, I followed the instructions here:
(http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1327)

I opted for WinRar rather than 7Zip, and I used easus to partition my free space, creating a 1GB FAT32 partition to house the UBCD image (leaving me with 9GB free).

Now, all of this worked good and great, but I could not get the machine to boot both partitions from a menu no matter how I tried to configure boot.ini - the MBR can only have one active bootable partition, and I could not for the life of me figure out what parameters would make it boot the UBCD partition - It would try, then just reboot.

So I decided to install Slackware Linux on the remaining space. I figured this way I could use the LILO bootloader, and I would have a Linux partition should I ever need it.

After I got Slackware installed and configured LILO to boot the Windows XP partition, the UBCD partition and the Linux partition, I hooked in my extra-long IDE ribbon and power cable, and I was good to go! I've tested 10 hard drives I had stacked up so far - about half of them were bad (which is about what I expected - probably why they weren't used up already).

The only downside of this setup is the fact that you need to power down the machine in between tests - but, the customer will probably only need it a couple of times a week, so it should work out fine.

Note that there was no need to install Windows XP, except that I wanted to have a fully functional computer that doubled as a hard drive testing machine.

Questions? Comments? Things you'd like to think about?

Also - there must be an easier way to install a bootloader, but I wasn't aware of any, so I did what I knew would work.

(if anyone wants to build a machine like this and comes across this post doing research, feel free to contact me via e-mail if you have any questions - see my profile for contact info)