the Command Line: Projects: USB Utility Disk

USB Utility Disk

These are approximate instructions for putting Memtest86 and Hitachi Drive Fitness Test on a USB Flash drive (written mostly from memory).

Install GRUB on a flash drive

Find the device name of you USB flash drive, mount it, and install grub to it.

mount /dev/sdb1 /media/usbdisk/
/sbin/grub-install  --root-directory=/media/usbdisk/ /dev/sdb

Download memtest86

Download the memtest ISO image from www.memtest86.com

Downloaded FreeDOS distro

From the FreeDOS site, download a FreeDOS distribution like this one fdbootcd.iso

Downloaded Hitachi disk checker

You can get a free Drive Fitness Test program from Hitachi. I used the binary disk image.

Mount image

Mount the FreeDOS ISO and Memtest86 ISO and move images to USB device (assuming mounted on /metdia/usbdisk).

mount fdbootcd.iso /mnt/cdrom/ -o loop
cp /mnt/cdrom/data/memdisk /media/usbdisk/memdisk
cp dft32_v406_b00_install.img /media/usbdisk/dft.img
umount /mnt/cdrom
mount memtest86-3.2.iso /mnt/cdrom/ -o loop
cp /mnt/cdrom/boot/memtest.img /media/usbdisk/memtest.img

Modified grub.conf

Add the following to your /media/usbdisk/boot/grub.conf on your USB device

title Memtest86
  kernel /boot/memtest.img

title Hard Disk Checker
  root (hd0,0)
  kernel /memdisk floppy=0
  initrd /dft.img