I need to run Seagate diagnostics utility (Seatools), but my computer has no cd reader, no floppy drive, and my disk is so defective that grub won’t boot.

But it has a NIC that supports PXE.

Thanks to http://reboot.pro/8258/ and http://www.isalo.org/wiki.debian-fr/inde(..) I’m able to run these tools via network.

Enter the BIOS, enable network boot.

Boot, write down the mac address.

On another computer (currently a debian squeeze), install a dhcp, pxe, a tftp server and gpxelinux (see the second link above, in french).

Download « Seatools for DOS », it’s an iso image. Rename it to seatools.iso and save it in /srv/tftp

Edit /srv/tftp/pxelinux.cfg/default and create an entry like:

label 1
 MENU LABEL Seatools
 kernel memdisk
 append iso
 initrd /seatools.iso

And voilà ! You can now boot this iso image via pxe.