Bootable floppy?

[YoTank Girl]

I had some computer trouble last week, and I got it running for now, but I want to check to make sure my hard drive isn't failing. I have a Samsung SV8004H HDD and I downloaded this Hutil from the samsung website that will check the drive, but it says I need a bootable floppy because the program is a DOS based utility. How do I make a bootable floppy and how do I get the computer to boot from it? I've tried searching google, but I don't understand the stuff that comes up and most of it is for making a windows bootable disk. Or too if there's an easier way to check my hard drive let me know. Thanks!

 

[kchi55]

alright.. well you need a floppy drive for this. that's.. a duh.
you need a floppy disk 1.44mb. if you don't have one. ask a friend, they're usually all over the place.
it doesn't matter if the floppy has stuff on it, you can clean it up on ur own and delete the stuff.
ok i'm guessing this is kinda like feature tool which i had to use on my hitachi hdd.
download the thing from the samsung website, and it should be a .exe. launch it while the floppy disk is in your system and it should go solo from there. then take the floppy out, turn off your computer and turn it back on.
from there the DOS operations should start up during while the computer is booting up and you'll be able to enable such features as 3.0gb/s SMART and other crap, i dunno what features your HDD allows. and make sure your motherboard supports such features before you activate them.
that's the jist of things.. i think.

 

[YoTank Girl]

I guess I don't know exactly what you mean, here are the instructions from the samsung website:
3. Execution
*Hutil is a DOS based utility so it is needed to prepare a bootable 1.44-MB diskette in advance.
*Download Hutil_creator.exe on the diskette prepared from the internet. (Hutil_creator.exe is an auto extract execution file.)
*When you execute the Hutil_creator.exe, Hutil folder will be created and extract Hutil.exe and Hutilxxx.cfg files.
*Reboot the system by above diskette.
*Execute the program by typing A:\Hutil.exe in DOS mode.
*Please Back-up your data before executing this program. Hutil.exe and Hutilxxx.cfg have to be always together on same folder.

I just don't understand what a bootable floppy is and then how to get the computer to reboot by the diskette

 

[kchi55]

a bootable floppy is a floppy that you can 'boot' a program from. this is what you do. once you run hutil_creator.exe with a floppy in your floppy drive, it will turn your orginally blank floppy, into a 'bootable floppy' then you just restart your computer with it. and the DOS program should appear allowing you to select different features of your hdd.

 

[YoTank Girl]

Actually that was the first thing I tried and it didn't work, but I finally figured it out last night right before I left work, I found a Google site that made sense to me. All I had to do was right click on the A: drive and go to format and then check the MS-DOS Startup disk option and then do what the instructions told me to do