Disable sector auto-relocation on newer Samsung drives

[deftrue]

Hi all,

I've got a F2_EG Samsung drive, 4 heads, H0 is weak and G/R-List is now full (!!!RLIST FULL!!!WCACHE DISABLED!!!). H0 reading is very slow, I think it keeps trying to relocate bad sectors, despite the fact there's no more room for relocations. PC3K does not natively support disabling relocation for this drive family, but maybe some of you know what portion in RAM needs to be edited to get relocation attempts stopped.

Regards.

[deftrue]

So, does anybody has a clue on this topic? The drive is going extremely slow, and 20% of attempts result in a UNC error... reading and ignoring CRC code speeds the thing up, but I've checked these sectors and drive seems to return noise if I ignore CRC; everytime a different result.

Maybe a hint on the best place to start with?

Best regards

[BlackST]

What PC3000 are you using?

[deftrue]

Hi BlackST,

Thanks for answering. It's the UDMA 5.5.14.

Regards

[BlackST]

In my opinion you should change the headstack, unless there are more valid reasons to not open the drive. Otherwise, try imaging by head first combining what you have already cloned, maybe the needed data is already recovered at this stage. When you have weak head and it struggles to read on these drives, especially on large ones, every process becomes painfully slow, even defeating relocation.
If you have a DDI at hand, did you give the drive a go on it trying to tweak the parameters (HAVE ALL THE FIRMWARE BACKED UP FIRST AND BE ABSOLUTELY SURE THERE IS NO MEDIA DAMAGE/DRIVE WAS NOT KICKED HARD !!) ?
The safest way in this scenario is to image the good heads first, and then if you have a partial good image combine them. Just my 2 eurocent...

[deftrue]

Thanks for the tip. I've already got H1, H2 and H3 imaged up to where I can only see 0x00's (~400 GB), and zones are huge (about 25M sectors on OD). I'll give it a try with DDI. I attach a picture as an example of how painfully slow can this drive be... drive was supposedly not dropped nor beaten, but you know - who knows. Last thing I wanted to do is HS replacement, but I'm having problems on reconstructing the FS (LBA 63 or 2048 show nothing, and after scanning about 15% of the so far imaged portion I see ReiserFS, Ext3, NTFS and FAT entries), so, this is a challenge.

Regards

Attachments

Bad sectors on H0