Re: Running HGST's DFT utility from a flash drive

[David <bouncingcats@gmail.com>]

On Thu, 22 Oct 2020 at 08:45, David <bouncingcats@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Oct 2020 at 02:04, Celejar <celejar@gmail.com> wrote:

> > Searching EXE: A:/DFT/DFT-V300.EXE
> >         Inflating: CleanDsk.PID
> >         Inflating: CleanMBR.PID
> >         Inflating: DFT.EXE
> > PXSFX: (E50) Disk Full, file: *

More hints:

I just noticed another annoyance, that "disk full" error suggests
that it expects A: to be writable as well. So you will need
to solve that issue.

It's weird that LOADDFT.EXE takes a self-extracting file
as an argument. Especially as the files are being extracted
onto the floppy drive, so they must be small enough to fit
on there anyway, so why compress them. Maybe it's just
a packaging convenience.

Looking again at this line from AUTOEXEC.BAT:
  LOADDFT.EXE  DFT-V300.EXE DFT.EXE /PSR >NUL

suggests that running DFT.EXE (one of the self extracted
files, per above) is the ultimate goal, perhaps by loading it
with LOADDFT.EXE

So this is what I think needs to happen:
I would run DFT-V300.EXE somewhere that it can successfully
extract all its files, put all those files into the image, disable the
AUTOEXEC.BAT and then try again. Run DFT.EXE manually, or try
  LOADDFT.EXE DFT.EXE
as one command. It does not matter how you get to that point,
it does not all need to happen at boot time.

Unfortunately, their CD image uses exactly the same code
as above so it also requires an A: drive that is writeable
by DOS for their stupid extraction code to succeed.

A final thought is that _might_ actually need the ramdrive,
but that would be weird too. If not, you can probably disable
most or all of CONFIG.SYS too.