Before you return your drive to Seagate for repairs they ask you to run their diagnostics tool called SeaTools. My ThinkPad X200 doesn’t have an optical drive but since they dropped support for floppy disks there’s no other chance than using the ISO Seagate provides. Because I’m too lazy to actually get up from my bed and shove that ThinkPad into it’s docking bay (which has an optical drive) and also because I didn’t want to waste a CD-R on this 7 MB tool I decided to find a way to make it boot from USB.

SYSLINUX and MEMDISK to the rescue!

  1. Format your USB drive with the FAT file system. Make sure you erase the bootsector and mark the partition bootable afterwards.
  2. Install SYSLINUX: yum install syslinux
  3. Install the SYSLINUX MBR onto your device: cat /usr/share/syslinux/mbr.bin > /dev/sdX
  4. Install SYSLINUX onto your USB drive: syslinux /dev/sdX
  5. Copy the MEMDISK bootloader from /usr/share/syslinux/memdisk to your drive’s root
  6. Now copy the SeaTools ISO to your USB drive
  7. At the root of your device create a file called syslinux.cfg with the following content: 
    DEFAULT SeaTools
LABEL SeaTools
  LINUX memdisk
  INITRD SeaToolsDOS220ALL.576.ISO
  APPEND iso
  8. Now you should be able to boot from your USB drive