Today a couple of laptops came in for repair. One is a super-thin Sharp laptop with a dead hard drive. What an opportunity to run SpinRite!, I thought. But there was just one problem: no disk nor disc drives of any kind.
These super-thin laptops have a hard drive, but no optical drive and definitely no floppy drive. They’re meant to work with an external USB CD-ROM drive, but I don’t have one of those. So my only options were to (1) Tear it apart and swap out the hard drive, or (2) Network boot.
The computer doesn’t support booting to a USB flash drive, so that was out.
I didn’t know how to boot from network, so I figured it out with Google.
Certainly I couldn’t find any info about booting SpinRite over the network, but I did it!
The computer connected to my network right awayThe strange thing is that my router says it has a 7-day lease. I guess that’s right.
192.168.1.109 Â Â Â 08:00:1F:13:73:FD Â Â Â 6 day(s) 23 hr(s) 59 min(s) 30 sec(s)
At first it didn’t work, giving me a “TFTP Open Timeout” error. I searched for an Argon tutorial, since that’s the program I’m using to do PXE boot. No dice. I looked for an Argon Client Boot Manager tutorial, but strangely there’s not much info about this very powerful-looking program. I looked for info on the Argon TFTP server, but didn’t find anything. Then I found that Argon has a separate TFTP program, so I ran that and got a little closer.
But it wasn’t until I got Tftpd32, set Argon’s directory has the home directory, and selected PXE Compatibility that it actually worked.
Here’s the Tftpd32 log:
Connection received from 192.168.1.109 on port 2075 [27/09 18:17:16.546]
Unexpected request 4 from peer [27/09 18:17:16.562]
Returning EBADOP to Peer [27/09 18:17:16.562]
Connection received from 192.168.1.109 on port 2070 [27/09 18:17:35.937]
Read request for file <boot.ldr>. Mode octet [27/09 18:17:35.937]
OACK: <tsize=4864,> [27/09 18:17:35.937]
Using local port 3790 [27/09 18:17:35.937]
Peer returns ERROR <TFTP Aborted> -> aborting transfer [27/09 18:17:35.937]
Connection received from 192.168.1.109 on port 2071 [27/09 18:17:35.937]
Read request for file <boot.ldr>. Mode octet [27/09 18:17:35.937]
OACK: <blksize=1456,> [27/09 18:17:35.937]
Using local port 3791 [27/09 18:17:35.937]
TIMEOUT waiting for Ack block #1Â [27/09 18:17:50.937]
Connection received from 192.168.1.109 on port 2070 [27/09 18:18:55.796]
Read request for file <boot.ldr>. Mode octet [27/09 18:18:55.796]
OACK: <tsize=4864,> [27/09 18:18:55.796]
Using local port 3797 [27/09 18:18:55.796]
Peer returns ERROR <TFTP Aborted> -> aborting transfer [27/09 18:18:55.812]
Connection received from 192.168.1.109 on port 2071 [27/09 18:18:55.812]
Read request for file <boot.ldr>. Mode octet [27/09 18:18:55.812]
Using local port 3798 [27/09 18:18:55.812]
<boot.ldr>: sent 10 blks, 4864 bytes in 0 s. 0 blk resent [27/09 18:18:55.812]
Connection received from 192.168.1.109 on port 2072 [27/09 18:18:55.859]
Read request for file <SpinRite.img>. Mode octet [27/09 18:18:55.859]
Using local port 3799 [27/09 18:18:55.859]
<SpinRite.img>: sent 501 blks, 256000 bytes in 0 s. 0 blk resent [27/09 18:18:55.984]
Anyone know anything about 32-bit transfers for hard drives? Why is it disabled by default? What makes it cause problems, and what kinds of problems can it cause?
SpinRite says the drive is overheating. It’s about 120 degrees Fahrenheit. I wonder if enabling 32-bit transfer would help.
So how did you set up PXE to run Spinrite? I’ve got a toshiba portege with the same problem.
Hi Jason,
Essentially, I used Argon Client Boot Manager and an image of the SpinRite book disk.