Seagate Constellation CS SED

[leebishop27]

Hi, I have a problem with my HDD, It is working still, however it is showing that it has 36280 reallocated sectors and 29256 which is strange because it adds up to 65536, no matter what I do i cannot get the drive to increase or lower the numbers i believe it may be some sort of firmware glitch or bug. I believe this because scanning the drive does not show any bad sectors at all and writing zeros to the drive does not decrease the pending sectors

The drive is also slow, (3 days to do a full scan) but it works in bursts it is hard to explain so i have attached a screenshot of the scan in victoria.

any help will be greatly appreciated, I do not care about the data on the drive


Things I have tried already:
Enhanced Secure Erase via parted magic (took 2 mins due to it being an SED model drive)
Interfacing over serial gives me a garbled output, i think due to the drives being 1.8V (grenada family)
Different USB caddies and sata ports on different chipsets (old Nforce 6 Ultra, Intel Z68 and Intel Z170)
cleaning the contacts on the pcb that connects to the heads and motor

[michael chiklis]

It's not a fw bug, your drive has bad surface and probably also some weak head.
The slow responding very likely is due to weak heads, this confirms that your drive is really physically damaged.

[leebishop27]

The bad sectors only started to rise after a power outage, scanning the entire surface shows that it reads and writes every sector fine, i just find it strange that the pending and reallocated sectors add up to 65536 and nothing I do will make those pending sectors either reallocate or change in value. Before the power outage there was no bad sectors at all

[leebishop27]

I found a weird workaround for accessing the drive at normal speeds, I sleep the drive using Victoria and then start a scan so that it starts instantly when the drive spins up, this drive then scans at the normal speed, Is there any way I can move the g list to the p list on this model so that the defect list is cleared, when scanning there is no bad sectors so I don’t think that there is really that many

[michael chiklis]

If you don't have any data to recover from this drive and you want just to play with it (and fix it), then you should get a license of WD Marvel.
With this tool you'll be able to do g to p list or even better, you can start a selfscan to refurbish it.

P.S.
If heads are faulty, refurbishing of the drive may be impossible, or possible but with some head cutted, this means that you would get a lower capacity drive.
If you need data, you shouldn't do g to p list, neither selfscan.

[michael chiklis]

OOppss,
i'm sorry, this is a seagate drive, not WD drive. WD Marvel wouldn't help to fix this drive.
There isn't any valid tool to fix seagate drives.