On Thu, 22 Oct 2020 at 08:45, David <bouncingc...@gmail.com> wrote: Hmmm again. Ignore my previous message. I didn't read the thread carefully enough. I still haven't done that, because I should be doing other things, but I have looked a little bit more carefully so I have slightly better suggestions.
First, https://www1.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT says: """ Drive Fitness Test Version 4.16 The Drive Fitness Test (DFT) quickly and reliably tests SCSI, IDE and SATA drives. [...] Supports Leading Drives - SCSI. - Serial ATA. - Parallel ATA. - IDE. """ So apparently it claims to work with all those interfaces. But read the notes. Next, check pages 5 and 6 and 31 of https://www1.hgst.com/hdd/support/downloads/Dft32_User_Guide_415.pdf in particular """ >From release 3.50, DFT supports Hitachi Serial-ATA drives when these drives are attached to - Motherboards and Plug-in PCI controllers, which utilises the Highpoint HPT374 and 372A (with Marvel bridge chip) chipsets, Silicon Image SIL3112A and 0680 chipset and Intel ICH5 chipset. Configurations NOT supported: - Drives attached using ATA RAID controllers where direct access to the attached devices is blocked by the controller also not supported are Multi-Channel SCSI RAID controllers. - Serial-ATA controllers based on the Silicon Image Promise and Intel chipsets are not currently supported """ It seems to be a 2009 document, pretty ancient. I downloaded the bootable image https://www1.hgst.com/hdd/support/downloads/ftool_215_install.IMG and looked inside it using: sudo mount -r -t msdos -o loop dft32_v416_b00_install.IMG /mnt/junk The CONFIG.SYS file in the image shows what drivers are expected to be loaded. A lot of what is in there is standard guff (ramdrive, upper memory use, that may well be unnecessary) and causing the error messages you reported earlier. It could be greatly simplified. It looks like no additional drivers are loaded for ATA drives. The AUTOEXEC.BAT file in the image contains the essential PATH=A:\DOS;A:\DFT;A:\; cd DFT LOADDFT.EXE DFT-V300.EXE DFT.EXE /PSR >NUL The final line is the most important. That shows the correct use of the LOADDFT.EXE and DFT-V300.EXE files, and invalidates my previous advice. The >NUL might be hiding diagnostic messages. And I wonder if /PSR is anything like "terminate and stay resident" so I would be wary of expecting sensible results if running that line more than one time. What I would do is rename AUTOEXEC.BAT in the image, to disable it, and I would run the above commands manually at the DOS prompt. And I would run them without the >NUL and perhaps also without the /PSR
