As the title says, I have gone through three Momentus drives (one 160GB that was a client's, and he NEEDED the data intact on that specific drive, don't ask me why so specific , the other two drives (100GB and 500GB) are mine), all which shared the same issues:

1. SMART reporting a lot of bad sectors - the client's specific drive was 9%, although one of mine (a 100GB drive from a HP) even had 0%
2. Said drive would have a bit of trouble accessing certain areas (though it was working fine) where the supposed bad sectors would reside

Now, the strange part is this - at least two of the drives, I had the chance to reset SMART values to BRAND NEW through the terminal. Here's the interesting thing I've noticed - after successfully resetting the 160GB and 100GB drives, they performed like new drives. I mean, if before I had hanging while accessing certain sectors on both drives, now I could access everything with no issues whatsoever. In fact, the 100GB drive is still chugging along like a new drive in an ASUS X59SL laptop with Windows 7. I haven't reset the 500GB (which is a 7200 drive) yet but I'm somewhat expecting the same results.

Here's my main question - is this some kind of bug in Momentus drives that makes them rack up false bad sectors out of the blue? This has been bugging my mind for some time and thought I'd share it with you.

Drive sources:

100GB - unknown HP
160GB - HP DV6700 (Intel)
500GB - HP DV6-2125so (AMD)

from my understanding, Seagate drives run a background surface scan at certain times to check for bad sectors without user intervention. If it finds any it will add this to the its permanent bad sector list that is automatically updated and windows will not see any bad sectors and the drive will work as normal.

They are added to something called a P list on the drive itself. SMART reports tell you how many times its been done. Once a bad sector has been listed, the drive will work normally like new and never see that sector again, its like they scan the disk at the factory to list all the bad sectors before selling it off. Even if you format the drive again in windows it will not see any bad sectors. The problem sector fixed secretly, until a new one appears and the drive will fix and hide that again.

I think you just messed around, reset the drive a few times and allowed the drive to do its background stuff. If you can view the P AND L list in terminal, then you can see how bad the disk is. the problem is if the list gets full you will end up with a corrupted drive that will not start again. Resetting the SMART only erases the log of how many was listed, but it will not repair, or remove the bad clusters that have already been listed, its just hidden and a spare sector allocated to keep the disk size in tact.

I only did the reset once per each drive (except the 500GB, as my terminal cable broke and I'm going to buy a new one hopefully).

Though how come the sectors did not rack up again? I just booted up my ASUS X59SL laptop and the health is at 100% still, and it's been more than half a year since it was reset. Even my desktop's IBM branded ST31000340NS has dropped the health to 98% from 100%. (power on issues, as I initially used it as a external HDD and the 12v charger was kinda crappy)

As for the procedure, I simply used the SMART reset guide, the same used to fix BSY drives.

Perhaps running some full scans may help understand the condition better. Tools that look at health status pull that information from SMART attributes. So, if SMART is reset, then the tools seems the drive as 100% healthy.

So, can run some scans to confirm with HDDScan, Victoria, MHDD, HDTune, etc.

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

One quick question - what baud rate does the 7200.4 use? I can access the terminal for 5400.6 drives, but not 7200.4.

Same baud rate. Some Seagates, probably 7200.4 don't give terminal access.

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Managed to get terminal access. Apparently 7200.4 is F3 arch, so same settings apply as 7200.11.

Cleared G list, and will take a try at clearing P-List too. Wonder if that will make the drive work fine again? There's a specific command for it (G6A on level 1) and the drive was wiped clean anyways, so no big loss.

btw, I'm doing this all under XP, since the CA-42 cable I got uses a "HugePine" chip that doesn't have support for anything newer than XP

I don't think clearing any P or G list was a good idea, it would have been best to format the system area using the g and p list and merge them all into p list to make the drive work normally. I think you might have bricked the drive or have partial access.

i hope you meant the user area
But yeah, it's no point clearing the Plist, format it using plist only makes sense. If you do it without skipping cert, it rewrites the whole user area so no partial access problem occurs. Partial access is only a problem for reading anyway, it is possible to write any sector even in that state...

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

I did clear P and G list and still have complete access to drive. I do think it has some platter damage or something else, as it would crash with a BSOD and disappear after the first restart of the Windows 7 setup. Power cycling laptop makes the drive show up again.



I don't mind doing a lot of experiments to this Seagate drive (I plan on getting a HGST 7200RPM anyways, it's for a nice Acer 8930G lappy) so I might give formatting using P-List a go. I did use G6A to clean P-List, as well as setting "RWRecoveryFlags" to be disabled. For a free 500GB drive I don't really mind if it dies, I still have another one I could bash around with (I had another ST9500420 with a dead PCB, that also must've come from a DV6 given it had a "REPLACE WITH HP SPARE" sticker.

So, for anyone having any ideas what terminal stuff to do with it, go ahead. Keep in mind, it's a experimental drive, with no sensitive data whatsoever (just a b0rked Win7 semi-install lol)

you need to recertify it if you alredy cleared plist.
try T>m0,0,,,,,,22
but i am not sure if it will produce a new plist...
It will take a while to complete, a few hours i guess.

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

I tried running that after running the RW command but got smacked in the face with a RAP subfile 201c error.