Welcome to Seagate's openSeaChest_GenericTests diagnostic software.

One of the fundamental units of data on a storage device like a disk drive is
the sector.  In the case of a hard disk drive, a sector is a physical section
of a circular magnetized track accessed by read write heads over the rotating
media.  The original hard drive sectors are 512 bytes each.  If you take the
number or logical sectors on a disk drive and multiply it by 512 you get the
total capacity of the drive in bytes.  Since the mid-1990's the term sector has
been replaced by an acronym synonym LBA, which stands for Logical Block
Address.  All drives start with LBA 0 and count up to the full capacity of the
drive.

In the example above, the physical sector size is 512 bytes and logical sector
size is also 512 bytes.  Beginning around the year 2010 disk drives have been
manufactured with a physical sector size of 4096 bytes but the disk drive
delivers these bytes in 8 logical sectors of 512 bytes.  The operating system
expects 512 and is not concerned about the actual physical size.  These drives
are said to have 512 byte emulation.  Beginning in 2014, some enterprise drives
are manufactured with 4096 byte for both physical and logical block sizes.

openSeaChest_GenericTests reads LBA and reports errors when an LBA is unreadable.

It may be possible to repair a problem when a generic read test fails due to
failure to read a particular sector (LBA).  You might consider the
--repairOnFly, --repairAtEnd or (SeaChest_SMART) -dstAndClean command line
options.  See the sections below "Sector Repair Commands" and "Bad LBA (Sector)
Found" for more information on this subject.

NOTE: openSeaChest_GenericTests may not be fully functional on non-Seagate drives.

This User Guide file contains important information about openSeaChest.
Please read this entire file before using this software.

openSeaChest is a comprehensive, easy-to-use command line diagnostic tool that
helps you quickly determine the health and status of your Seagate storage
product. It includes several tests that will examine the physical media on your
Seagate, Samsung or Maxtor disk drive.

Tests and commands which are completely data safe will run on any disk drive.
Tests and commands which change the drive (like firmware download or data
erasure or setting the maximum capacity, etc) are limited to Seagate disk
drives (this includes Seagate, Maxtor, Samsung and LaCie). Be careful using
openSeaChest because some of the features, like the data erasure options, will
cause data loss. Seagate is not responsible for lost user data.

Inner and outer diameter tests refer to the physical beginning and ending
sections of a hard disk drive with rotating magnetic media.  In the case of SSD
devices, these tests refer to the logical beginning and ending sections of the
solid state drive.

Important note: Many tests in this tool directly reference storage device data
sectors, also known as Logical Block Addresses (LBA). Test arguments may
require a starting LBA or an LBA range.  The predefined variable 'maxLBA'
refers to the last sector on the drive.  Many older SATA and SAS storage
controllers (also known as Host Bus Adapters [HBA]) have a maximum addressable
limit of 4294967295 [FFFFh] LBAs hard wired into their design.  This equates to
2.1TB using 512 byte sectors.  This also means accessing an LBA beyond the
2.1TB limitation either will result in an error or simply the last readable LBA
(usually LBA 4294967295 [FFFFh]) depending on the actual hardware.  This
limitation can have important consequences.  For example, if you intended to
erase a 4TB drive, then only the first 2TB will actually get erased (or maybe
even twice!) and the last 2TB will remain untouched.  You should carefully
evaluate your system hardware to understand if your storage controllers provide
support for greater than 2.1TB.

Usage - Linux (run with sudo)
=============================
        openSeaChest_GenericTests [-d <sg_device>] {arguments} {options}

Examples - Linux
================
        sudo openSeaChest_GenericTests --scan
        sudo openSeaChest_GenericTests -d /dev/sg2 -i
        sudo openSeaChest_GenericTests -d /dev/sg1 --twoMinuteGeneric

Usage - Windows (run as administrator)
======================================
        openSeaChest_GenericTests [-d <PD_device>] {arguments} {options}

Examples - Windows
==================
        openSeaChest_GenericTests --scan
        openSeaChest_GenericTests -d PD0 -i
        openSeaChest_GenericTests -d PD1 --twoMinuteGeneric

