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Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
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SCSI Drive capacity undetectable after reassigning a bad sec

December 27th, 2008, 2:41

I just installed a SCSI controller (Ratoc REX-PCI32) which uses an Initio INIC-950P chipset.

I had connected a Conner 540MB drive to it and went into the SCSI BIOS and was running the "verify disk" command.

At about 60% or so I got a message "bad sector detected" with two options: "reassign" or "skip"

I chose reassign, assuming it would remap the sector to a reserved sector (as drives do) but the BIOS then threw up an error which went something like: "00h 02h 02h" and then complained it could not read the capacity of the drive when I went back to the menu and rescanned for drives.

Now the controller detects the model number OK but it is detected as 0MB and makes a clicking sound (although this stops sometimes, such as when the controller is scanning drives etc)

1) Is there any software I can use to reset the drive capacity to normal?

2) Did the controller break the drive or was the drive already faulty, and this sector reassign attempt finish it off?

Re: SCSI Drive capacity undetectable after reassigning a bad sec

January 3rd, 2009, 1:18

You should have an answer even though it won't help you.

This sounds like a surface scratch. If there was data on the drive, well you shouldn't have chosen the option that modifies the drive. Whenever you engage in a data recovery attempt, you must not change the original drive in any way.

The reason why you see the model name is because your PCB supplies that data. If you attempt to connect just the PCB disconnected from the drive, you'll see the same data in your SCSI controller interface. The drive can't read its system area likely due to a media defect.

Unfortunately, your problem went from being relatively easy to fix to a very expensive one.

Re: SCSI Drive capacity undetectable after reassigning a bad sec

December 19th, 2010, 6:50

Whooops, guess I never subscribed to notifications to this thread.. (Why do most forums have subscriptions disabled by default??)

Yes I posted this originally two years ago, but I'll post my reply for completeness, what the hey!


There was no data on the drive that I wanted, and the drive while working would have been useful, was not necessary for any reason.

I was just basically giving it a test out and seeing if it was OK or not. I guess it wasn't OK and as such it's probably a good thing I didn't end up trying to use it lest I did lose some important data.

Thanks for your reply and information. I will remember your advice if this happens again. :)
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