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Samsung ES Tool warning
I thought I'd pass along the fruits of an unpleasant learning experience.
Over the years, I've used many manufacturer-supplied diagnostic programs. None of them were destructive, whether from WD, IBM, Maxtor, etc. The Samsung offering - called ES Tool - has broken from that tradition. Thinking that the warning about possible data loss was, like all the other diagnostic software, only relevant to obviously-destructive options in the program (such as low-level formatting), I didn't perform a backup on a pair of 1TB Spinpoint drives before running the basic diagnostic function (turns out file system errors were caused by a software bug, and the drives are fine). It is not read-only. It does a simple write-verify test, without any prompting (relying on the warning at the beginning of the program that data "may" be lost), which overwrites the last 8MB of the drive. A typical file system probably wouldn't even lose any data from this, since nothing is likely to be written to the last 8MB of a modern drive. Unless you did something radical like stripe the two drives together in Windows, which means that the last 1MB of the drive contains a Veritas LVM database. Used to contain, that is. I didn't lose any data in the end, but I did lose a lot of time (short answer: use dd in Linux to back up the volume portion of each disc, recreate the striped volume in Windows, then restore the backed up data with dd in Linux again; fairly time consuming when you need to compress/decompress on the fly across several drives because of the quantity of data). So if you want to test a Samsung drive, back the data up first. Or at least the last 8MB. |
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