Hi,

I was wondering if anybody was aware of any undocumented commands relating to reallocated sectors? I am particularly interested in being able to perform the following tasks:

• List the bad sectors that have been reallocated
• Force a specific sector to be reallocated
• Unmap a bad sector that has previously been remapped (ie remove it from the reallocation table)
• Report the free space in the reallocation table (ie number of sectors still available for reallocation)
• Report the size of the reallocation table (ie maximum number of sectors that can be reallocated)

If anybody knows of any undocumented commands (for any hard drive manuacturer) that could help with doing any of the above, I should be very grateful if they wouldn't mind sharing them.

Thanks very much!

Those are Vendor Specific Commands that will vary from brand to brand and from firmware arch to firmware arch even inside the same brand.

You need to colect/compile those commands over time. No one will tell them to you for free.

There are already many of those VSCs available on my site under public domain.

The fast way to get what you want is to BUY a firmware tool like PC-3000, MRT, etc or even use DEMO versions of tools to send commands to drives and see what commands the tools are sending ...

The majority of what you stated are related to G-List and fo the majority of drives you can :

- Read the G-List.
- Write the G-List.

(So you can download ir and edit it, re-calc checksum if appliable and write it back).

- Clear G-List.

Etc ... Etc ....

With firmware tools you don't have to worry about VSCs (Vendor Specific Commands) as the tools will issue thosecommands (unknown to you) to the drive.

If you are intro collecting VSCs to use with your own tools and if you do have some to share please do let us know :

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=35889

Regards.

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Ok start by reading this :

Translator, Defect Lists and Bad Sectors :

Then go here :

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewforum.php?f=59

You will find multiple examples of G-Lists like :

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=2205

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=2349

etc ...

Then you can move to a "firmware research" for a specific drive under the same topic of my site and check the VSCs to read/write defect lists or even clear them.

If you do have very old drives like WDC MCU based WD drives you can even use tools to generate scripts to read your modules by VSC :

One example :

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=191&t=2473

etc ...

Good luck with your research !

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As a side note there are also at te market VERY CHEAP firmware tools including one that can work with many modern types and brands of drives but because of licensing "problems" and very bad develloper policy i'm no longer recommending the use of those tools.

At any rate you will find all the info that you need on my site at least to test with some drives and without paying a cent !

Regards.

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Thanks very much Spildit, that has given me a LOT of material to work through. I have experience as computer programmer but none so far with firmware of any sort, so this will be quite a learning curve for me, but I always enjoy learning new skills. I've no idea where to start exactly, but the links you have provided sound interesting so they will be my first focus.

If I do manage to find anything useful I will report back.

Thanks again for all the info.

Ok, you can start here - http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=176

(read all links)

Then get a decent FREE ATA terminal like this - http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=2297

Get a drive that you don't care about and try some basic ATA commands (standard) like locking and unlocking the drive, etc - http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=1214

Now go buy a very old WDC MCU based WD drive (NOT a modern Marvell based drive) Read the differences here - http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=86&t=2353

Now that you have a BB type drive ED_xB you can get this tool here - http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=167&t=1719 and this will create scripts for you to use to retrieve the modules of your drive. You can run the script like this - http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php? ... =100#p9296 or run the commands one by one with your ATA terminal to fecth all the modules by hand !

If you are looking for some sort of "tool" and to work with modern drives you can for example get a modern WD drive - SATA and download this free demo : - http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=146&t=2435

Now you can play with your firmware and download/backup ROM and Modules of your drive. Of course you can check the defects directly with the tool and you can check the defects on modules manualy ... Later you can buy the tool if you like it. Or you can try to search for free "pirated" WDR posted all over the net (use google). It will work only with older Marvell drives but it's better than nothing ...

If your goal is to learn and study the commands then start by checking ATA terminal. If the goal is to fix drives and hide/un-hide defects it's faster and more reliable for you to buy firmware tools for the drives that you need to "play" with and use those tools instead of researching the Vendor Specific Commands.

The tools will do the work for you. And no-one will "share" a huge amount of VSCs with you unless you do have some to trade but there are a huge amount of them already available for free on my site.

For example if you do get older Fujitsu the majority of VSCs for those drives are well known.

There are many VSCs here as well - http://www.hddoracle.com/viewforum.php?f=202

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Oh ... and as a small side note i think you did attempt to register on my forum and i did delete you as a "spammer" because you did use something like hddoracle@ on your e-mail account !



It's a nice thing to use different mails to register to different sites if you do have a domain name and mail server, etc as you can then be aware of what mail that you recieve is generated for what site ... In other words if someone sell your e-mail to spammers you start to recieve spam on the e-mail that you used to register to one site so you know what site did sell your e-mail, etc ...

But because the mail contained the start of the oracle site i did consider it as "spam" itself as many bots do register using this sort of "method" as well to publish adverts ...

See you !

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Wow, thanks again for so many signposts! That is absolutely brilliant. That will definitely keep me busy for a while

Yes, that is precisely why I use a different email address for each website that requests one - just makes sense to me

Thanks again. I will probably be very quiet for a long time now while I try to digest all of that...

3g

Nice reading !

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