(PeteCresswell) said:
Just ran HdTune on a suspect IED drive and it's reporting a
damaged "block".
Is there any way to re-format that drive so that "block" is not
referenced or used?
Quotes bc all I know from are Sectors.
When they put the sectors on the hard drive, they have some
spares put with them.
If a sector is declared bad, it can be replaced by a spare.
This is managed automatically, by the hard drive itself,
and its onboard processor. The info is kept in a table inside
the drive, so that the drive knows which sector is "covering"
for a bad sector.
On IBM drives, the spares table is actually loaded into
the drive cache RAM, and can use up to 1/8th of the total
cache RAM available.
If you run an HDTune benchmark graph, the "roughness" of the
graph, can be a measure of the amount of sparing going on.
Your HDTune graph may be noise free when the drive is new,
and get worse with age. (Not all spikes in the HDTune graph
are drive related. At least some of the spikes, come from
latency within Windows.)
Once the spares are exhausted in a given area, then a sector
remains "bad". And even after a reformat, will show "bad".
Modern reformatting, doesn't affect the spares table.
Attempts to read a bad sector, for which no spare is available,
would likely be reporting a CRC error at the hardware level.
To reset the spares table (eliminate grown defects and try again),
as far as I know, that is not an option available over the IDE
cable. But there are other interfaces on drives, that support
a maintenance interface. The problem with the maintenance
interface, is the lack of documentation. The manufacturer
of the drive, doesn't really want more tech support calls
or RMA requests, because of self-inflicted damage.
(Seagate "maintenance" TTL logic level serial port interface)
http://www.overclock.net/hard-drives-storage/457286-seagate-bricked-firmware-drive-fix-pics.html
http://sites.google.com/site/seagatefix/
That is an *example* of what people do to their drives.
I've never seen a description of what command set is
available via that interface. If there is such a
description, the holder of such a document will likely
want money for it.
There is a forum where "drive repair experts" world wide,
exchange secrets about drives. Since they make money from
various forms of data recovery, they exchange secrets via
Email. As it's a money driven system, you aren't likely
to learn enough to do "home repair".
Your bad sector, was "given a chance" by the disk controller
firmware. So it's been evaluated once, and found lacking.
Resetting the declaration of a bad sector, is just
asking for trouble, when it goes bad immediately
afterwards. Replacing the drive is the best alternative,
when there is evidence in the SMART statistics, that
there is dirt or debris inside the drive. A non-zero
Pending count is one indicator of trouble.
At the very least, if you see even one non-green block
in the HDTune surface scan, make sure the drive is
backed up somewhere.
Paul
