Samsung F3 500GB does not reallocate sectors.

[Mad Professor]

I got a Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB 7200rpm I bought it in 2010 for my desktop but end up going into my fileserver, long story short, zfs started reporting read/checksum errors and dmesg show the drive as device not ready and medium errors, went ahead and swap the disk with a new seagate. I have it here on my bench. The drive works and S.M.A.R.T shows no issues as in no pending sectors or reallocated sectors, everything else seems normal.

I ran seatools, es-tools they report 4-5 errors around LBA 800000000 onward. So I ran low level format that didn't work, switch to hdat2 ran check and repair, that didn't work. I tried the powerful test setting that didn't work either, so switch to hdd regenerator and ran it's scan and repair, then check S.M.A.R.T, it reported 3 pending sectors then I ran D-Ban and reran seatools and hdat2, still saying there were errors in the same spot, check S.M.A.R.T, the 3 pending no longer exist, but the reallocated still remain 0.
I tried mhdd and that didn't work either.

Now I'm rerunning hdd regenerator, regen mode but my faith in it is... a leap of faith.

I've also partition the drive up to 250GB at the beginning of the drive and wrote a bunch of large 50GB gzip data backups and then copy it back over and checksum individually and they check out fine, but then did it again with a partition at the end of the drive and some of them came back with a mismatch. It's not a read or write issue and something actually wrong with the platters.

First off, why won't it reallocate it? It's obviously a permanent magnetic error or physical damage on the platters. Second off are there any other useful tools that can repair or force the drive to remap/reallocate?

[drforbin]

I had same problem with my 7200.12 before it died on me...let me know pm me if you find out any information.

[Mad Professor]

The model is HD502HJ, but as you said no data to recover so we can do whatever the hell we want to the drive.

I would like to repair since I don't know how it got f***ed up in the first place. It's never been dropped or mishandled. The only thing I can think of, it didn't park at some point in it's life and got damage that way.

if I can't fix it, at least I can use it in of my mythtv frontend machines, or use in my bitch box, or store some non-critical/unimportant virtual machines or something.

not a big deal.

[BlackST]

Now I'm rerunning hdd regenerator, regen mode but my faith in it is... a leap of faith.

HDD Degenerator won't do anything on your drive.

First off, why won't it reallocate it?

Because it simply doesn't work the way you wish.

It's obviously a permanent magnetic error or physical damage on the platters.

If there was a physical damage on platters heads would have been already killed. It is just a flaw, normal wear and tear.

Second off are there any other useful tools that can repair or force the drive to remap/reallocate?

Yes, but it's gonna cost you thousands of $$$. Not a good idea for end users.

Too bad you are not here because we could repair and fix like brand new your drive at a low cost.

[fzabkar]

Try Makebad:
viewtopic.php?t=6538&start=
http://files.hddguru.com//index.php?&di ... ft/Makebad

[Mad Professor]

I like how everyone wants money in this thread and yet the one guy that suggests a free simple solution which is what I was asking for. I don't mind spend money on software if it actually fixes my problem and I could use for other drives I come across with this issue.

I'll give makebad a try and see what happens.

[einstein9]

Mad Professor

ran low level format that didn't work

switch to hdat2 ran check and repair, that didn't work

I tried the powerful test setting that didn't work either

so switch to hdd regenerator

Bad move..

You almost tried all the known FREE tools here with your drive
and then

I like how everyone wants money in this thread

No one here (who replied) with advices wanted something from you, basically opinions & thoughts
but @ the end, you will find that most of the time, Free tools/Apps will not help and you will have to seek a Pro. for such cases with proper tools (HW) and knowledge

good luck

[BlackST]

A BURN-IN (assuming i have burn-in script/resource for your specific drive) on the drive would most likely make it as new, but it would be more expensive to send the drive to Portugal and back to you then to buy a new drive.

Or will likely kill/brick the drive and bye bye 'bitcoin donations'.

[fzabkar]

There is a WRITE UNCORRECTABLE EXT command in the ATA standard that allows you to intentionally write a bad ECC to a particular LBA. If you do this and then subsequently run CHKDSK (Windows) with a full surface scan, then the bad sectors may be placed in the $BADCLUS metafile (NTFS) or marked as bad in the FAT (FAT32).

See section 7.78 in the following document.

Working Draft AT Attachment 8 - ATA/ATAPI Command Set (ATA8-ACS):
http://www.t13.org/Documents/UploadedDo ... A8-ACS.pdf

[BlackST]

There is a WRITE UNCORRECTABLE EXT command in the ATA standard that allows you to intentionally write a bad ECC to a particular LBA. If you do this and then subsequently run CHKDSK (Windows) with a full surface scan, then the bad sectors may be placed in the $BADCLUS metafile (NTFS) or marked as bad in the FAT (FAT32).

See section 7.78 in the following document.

Working Draft AT Attachment 8 - ATA/ATAPI Command Set (ATA8-ACS):
http://www.t13.org/Documents/UploadedDo ... A8-ACS.pdf

As result the drive will become slow.

[fzabkar]

There is a WRITE UNCORRECTABLE EXT command in the ATA standard that allows you to intentionally write a bad ECC to a particular LBA. If you do this and then subsequently run CHKDSK (Windows) with a full surface scan, then the bad sectors may be placed in the $BADCLUS metafile (NTFS) or marked as bad in the FAT (FAT32).

See section 7.78 in the following document.

Working Draft AT Attachment 8 - ATA/ATAPI Command Set (ATA8-ACS):
http://www.t13.org/Documents/UploadedDo ... A8-ACS.pdf

As result the drive will become slow.

Why?

[fzabkar]

Try HUTIL:
http://files.hddguru.com/download/Softw ... ung/HUTIL/

See if it allows you to move the G-list to the P-list.

[int0x13]

No it's not working, it says "not supported model" something like that. It's not working for F1/F3/F5/M6, i think.