Drive Fitness Test Usage Instructions To support World Wide Web 10 Jul 2009 ©Hitachi Global Storage Technologies 2009 Page 1 of 31
Table of contents What is Drive Fitness Test? .................................................................................................................3 DFT System Fundamentals..................................................................................................................4 Creating a DFT Test Diskette ..............................................................................................................4 Windows OS’s ..........................................................
What is Drive Fitness Test? Hitachi offers a full line of 2.5 and 3.5-inch products with both high capacity and a diversity of interface options for high throughput operating environments, such as network and internet servers, multimedia production and digital video processing The prime purpose of DFT is to test hard disk drives while they remains inside a personal computer, even when the primary operating system may no longer be bootable.
DFT System Fundamentals The Drive Fitness Test currently provides for in-depth testing of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and legacy IBM disk drives and basic testing of Other Manufacturers drives. This new version will support standard disk drives with the ATA/IDE, Serial-ATA and SCSI interfaces. The basic tests will not overwrite customer data. The Drive Fitness Test (DFT) application is designed to run under native DOS (i.e.
Linux OS’s The Drive Fitness Test image file (e.g. DFT-v300img.bin) includes IBM PC DOS2000 and the Drive Fitness Test. The name of the image file will change according to the release version of DFT. Running the Linux Disk Dump (DD) utility creates an IBM PC DOS 2000 bootable diskette that contains the Drive Fitness Test Utility. A formatted 1.44-MB diskette is required to create the DFT diskette. To create the bootable DFT diskette under Linux: 1. Download the DFT image file (DFT-v3xximg.
DFT hardware support and restrictions DFT is designed to run on ATA, Serial-ATA and SCSI attached disk drives. From version 2.1 onwards DFT also supports testing of disk drives that have been manufactured by OEM manufactures (i.e. not Hitachi or IBM) in addition to Hitachi/IBM. However the depth of testing that is carried out on the non-IBM/Hitachi drives will be less than that performed on the Hitachi/IBM drives. Erase Disk and Erase Master Boot Sector functions are not supported on nonHitachi/IBM drives.
SCSI Requirements: To test SCSI drives DFT requires a DOS loadable ASPI manager for the SCSI Controller that the drives are attached to. Note: Some ASPI managers offer support only for removable media devices e.g. CD-ROM’s, Tape etc. check the documentation that was supplied with your SCSI controllers or contact your SCSI controller supplier to see if this is the type of ASPI managers you have.
DFT will load automatically and present you with the License Agreement as shown below. This is a license agreement, which you should review prior to accepting using the “I Agree” button. The positioning and tab keys can be used to navigate through the license agreement and also the button selection. The program will progress only if you accept the license agreement by selecting the ‘I agree’ button.
If the list doesn’t contain the drive(s) that you wish to test then select No, you will be presented with the screen below. This window provides information about cabling and jumper settings, which could have prevented your drive from being detected, please power-off your system and check that your drive is correctly installed and re-start the DFT test.
The following screen shows the Technical Result Code window, this window contains information which you will require in order to use the Hitachi web based warranty process or when calling the Technical Support Centre. Please make record this information and press OK when finished.
The following shows the main DFT Test Menu screen, In this example, there are four drives visible in the Device List menu. One ATA hard disk is attached to the primary ATA port on the motherboard, one ATAPI DVD-ROM attached to the secondary ATA port on the motherboard and two other ATA hard disk attached to either a on motherboard or plug-in PCI ATA adapter. If more that 4 devices are installed then the side scroll bar can be used to view the additional drives.
Quick Test This leads to the next screen. Here the test is ready to start on the selected drive. All that needs to be done is to press enter again to Start the test, which is seen running in the next screen. In the screen above, the DFT test is running. The name of the active part of the test is displayed above the progress bar, (in this example - Analysing Media). The progress bar illustrates progress through the active test stage.
During testing DFT only performs read operations in the user data area, so your data files will not be overwritten. Write operations will ONLY be performed if you select the options to erase disk after a media error has been detected or when you select the Erase MBR operation from the Utility Menu. The screen above shows the conclusion of a test. In this case, the drive passed the DFT testing.
2. Return Run Erase Disk For more information on Erase Disk see the relevant sections of this document. NOTE –Erase Disk WILL result in data being deleted from your disk drive, only perform these activity if your data has been backed-up or you can afford to lose the data on your drive. For more details of what erase disk does see the relevant sections in this user guide.
If a test is stopped, for example by pressing the cancel button, the following screen will appear. Selecting Yes will cause the test to be stopped as shown in the following screen. This says that testing has not been completed, and is not a statement of either pass or fail. Testing must be restarted and run to completion in order to assess if there is a problem with the drive. The return code 0x10 is not an error.
Advanced Test If the Advanced Test option is selected, testing is similar to Quick Test, but all of the data area of the selected disk drive will be tested. DFT only performs a read test in the user data area, so your data will not be overwritten. Execution time will normally be in the order of 40 minutes, but this can be longer for very large capacity drives. Test progress will be illustrated as shown below.
Advanced Topics Menus Use the F10 key or the mouse to access menu items at the top of the main test screen, as illustrated below. These are generally a repeat of functions already displayed but also allow access to additional tests and utilities. The Exerciser test, as shown in the next screen, can be accessed from the menu or by using the hot key combination Alt+E.
The Exerciser is basically the Advanced Test with the addition of a number of 30-minute drive tests. The number of 30-minute periods can be set in the following option screen. The pass / fail / abort mechanism are similar to that of Quick Test.
Utilities The Utilities menu as shown below, gives you access to several useful tools. These should be used with CARE, for unlike the test described earlier the Erase Boot Sector, and Erase Disk utilities WILL permanently erase data from your drive(s). Selection of the Drive Info. Option as shown above will display useful information about the selected drive, see following screen. This information could be useful if you need to report a problem back to your drive supplier or Hitachi.
The drive information displayed above can be saved to a text file in the DATA sub-directory on the floppy drive. The default name of the text file is DRVINFO.TXT as shown below, you can change the filename by over typing this name with, for example, the drive serial number. The following screen will be displayed to confirm that the file has been saved.
Erase Boot Sector The boot sector of a disk contains the start-up programs for your operating system, it also contains information about how your disk is partitioned. If this sector becomes corrupted in any way and this is your boot drive you may not be able to start your system or access data on the drive.
When the following screen is displayed press the start button to erase the master boot sector. The following screen will be displayed when the operation has been completed successfully.
Erase Disk This utility will write zeroes to every sector of your hard drive including the boot sector, and can be used with both IDE and SCSI drives. This utility is meant to be used to clean-up disk which have errors written to the media (e.g. where a system has been powered off whilst writing data out to the drive). This utility can take a long time to run (more than an hour) depending on the capacity of the drive and the system configuration.
When the following screen appears, pressing the start button will result in your hard disk drive being erased. Progress will be illustrated as shown below, note there may be a small delay before the progress bar is updated.
After completing the erasure of the disk a sequential read of the disk is carried out to verify that all sectors have been initialised. The following screen will be displayed when the operation has been completed successfully.
ATA Functions S.M.A.R.T Operations. S.M.A.R.T. - Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology is intended to protect user data and prevent unscheduled system downtime that may be caused by predictable degradation and/or fault of the disk device. By monitoring and storing critical performance and calibration parameters, S.M.A.R.T. devices employ sophisticated data analysis algorithms to predict the likelihood of nearterm degradation or fault conditions. To enable/disable S.M.A.R.T., select S.M.A.R.T.
Error Code and first aid for your drive The following table defines all the currently supported DFT error codes. For example if during testing of your hard drive DFT reports a error code of 0x70 as shown on page 14, this indicates that your hard disk drive has problems reading one or more of its sectors. In most of these cases the drive can heal itself of these errors.
DFT Error Codes Codes Description 0x00 No Error 0x10 Test aborted by user. Command complete successfully. The current test was cancelled by user and cannot be completed. Rerun the test to conclusion Selected device not present. 0x20 The selected device could not be found on the selected port. Check cabling and HDD connectors. If the drive is not seen by the BIOS or is not spinning ATA Master device not present.
Testing of Non-Hitachi/IBM Hard Disk Drives DFT supports testing of hard disk drives, which were not manufactured by either Hitachi or IBM. Due to vendor specific design parameters the depth of testing, which will be carried out on these non-Hitachi/IBM, drives will be less than that performed on the Hitachi and IBM drives. Should DFT detect a problem with the drive, you will be presented with a result screen similar to that below.
Supplied ASPI Managers The following ASPI managers are supplied with the DFT Utility and provide support for the listed SCSI Controllers. Others are supported but have been removed due to space constraints of a floppy disk and others may work that haven’t been tested. If you have a particular one that is not present or supported, either add it and edit the config.sys with the appropriate instruction or contact the Call Centre for further advice. ASPI Manager ASPI2DOS.SYS 02-12-98 ASPI4DOS.
Troubleshooting ASPI Manager Fails to Load Note: Some implementation of SCSI on the Motherboard using the Adaptec AIC-7890 chipset will result in the ASPI Manager ASPI8U2.SYS (version 1.07), which is supplied on this DFT diskette, failing to load. Should this be the case and you are sure your SCSI controller is built around this chipset then you should replace the file ASPI8U2.SYS in the A:\ASPI sub-directory of the diskette with the ASPI8U2.
