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Dustin Hedges

96 Posts

47538

June 10th, 2011 07:00

Dell Advanced Format HDD Detection Tool

I just downloaded the new tool released by dell (http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz&releaseid=R306204&SystemID=lat_e6420&servicetag=&os=W764%20&osl=en&deviceid=29611&devlib=0&typecnt=0&vercnt=1&catid=-1&impid=-1&formatcnt=0&libid=41&typeid=-1&dateid=-1&formatid=-1&source=rss&fileid=461656) but I am not able to recognize drives plugged into my Precision WorkStation T7400. I'm running 1 Seagate Momentus 3 HDD (sent by Dell for testing) plugged directly into onboard SATA. I also have a SAS drive plugged into the Dell PeRC SAS Controller and another two 150GB SATA drives plugged in onboard.

When running DellAFDT.exe -r on any of the disks I am getting the following error message:
"Disk is a SCSI device. This tool works only with IDE disks."

I can understand seeing the error message when executing against the SAS drive on the SAS/SCSI controller, but why wouldn't the other two show up?

DELL-Warren B

1.1K Posts

June 10th, 2011 08:00

Do you get the same error when you run the tool without switches?

Dustin Hedges

96 Posts

June 10th, 2011 09:00

Running without switches produces this result:

"No IDE disk not found"

DELL-Warren B

1.1K Posts

June 10th, 2011 11:00

Thanks for the extra info. I'll send it along to the team responsible for the tool. I would suggest that you make sure you that BIOS and chipset drivers and controller firmware are up to date on your T7400 to eliminate those as part of the issue.

DELL-Warren B

1.1K Posts

June 17th, 2011 08:00

Dhedges01,

Spoke with the Dev team, the onboard SATA port on the T7400 may be enumerated through your SAS controller which would identify it as a SCSI drive which the AF Detection Tool doesn't evaluate.

You can verify which controller the drive is being enumerated with by checking the following.

Device Manager->Disk Drives->{for each drive}->Properties->Details->Enumerator

Thanks,

Warren

Dustin Hedges

96 Posts

June 17th, 2011 09:00

Yep, That seems to be the case.

Thanks for the clarification Warren.

Dustin

Dustin Hedges

96 Posts

June 17th, 2011 10:00

FYI,

I checked this on a T5500 that does NOT have a SCSI/SAS controller and all drives show "IDE" under the Enumerator property so this seems to be a function of the SCSI/SAS Controller overriding this setting.

Thanks,

Dustin

DELL-Warren B

1.1K Posts

June 20th, 2011 09:00

Excellent! Thanks for the info!

thatdood

1 Message

June 30th, 2011 10:00

Will this tool work on SSD drives? SSD drives are technically not AFD per se but they do use 4K sectors with 512-byte emulation. We ran the tool on a SSD and non SSD/non AFD drive and it came back with the status of not an AFD drive and partiotion were aligned. For the SSD this couldnt be correct as Win XP was running on the SSD and the alignment was never manually configured. These are Dell Samsung brand SSD's by the way.

DELL-Warren B

1.1K Posts

June 30th, 2011 13:00

The tool checks for identification information on the drive. If the drive doesn't identify itself as an AF drive it will assume it is a 512B drive.

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