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
October 9th, 2023, 13:55
Just joined. I have used a USB enclosure to low-level format a 3TB Toshiba HD that had been part of a 6TB RAID 10. I knew not to care about the speed of the operation. After more than a day of operation, the format process reported that it was canceled at 79%. I did not cancel it. Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit will let me attempt to run the tool again. Is doing that worth my time, or should I discard the drive? Is the failure to finish the format and the self-cancellation likely due to a failure of a component in the drive itself? A message saying that the drive could not be formatted would have made this clearer to me.
I have space in the desktop cabinet to install this drive which might make the operation run faster, but I hesitate to disturb everything in there since it's already quite crowded.
October 9th, 2023, 15:52
What's the goal? Why the need to erase entire LBA space?
Check SMART to see if it reveals issues.
October 9th, 2023, 20:44
The objective is simply to make the "failed" drive usable again. I have not lost ANY data. I already bought and installed a replacement for this drive that POST told me had made the array critical and RAIDeXpert rebuilt the array with the new drive. All good!
At the time my friend and I had put the system together, neither of us knew about RaidXpert, so earlier when a drive failed, he had me offload all the data, install a new drive, rebuild the RAID from scratch, and copy all the data back onto it - NIGHTMARE; but it did take care of the problem - twice. I had the old drive which I set aside. Later, I discovered RAIDXpert and the low-level format tool. It seems that a RAID10 can report that a drive has failed, but that doesn't mean it's dead. I ran the tool on the "dead" drive and it was completely successful. I then did a regular format on it and have been using it for simple additional storage ever since. With this new failure, I figured I'd try the same thing, but at 79% the low-level format stopped, and the program reported that the process was canceled. I did not cancel it.
My question truly is whether or not I should run the low-level format tool on this drive yet again, or is it just so likely that there is a hardware failure in this drive that will cause the low-level format tool to cancel the process yet again? It takes nearly two days to run when it is successful. All I have to do is wait for it and use electricity.
Thank you for your response and interest.
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