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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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Establish a serial connection with Toshiba 2.5 inch Sata Hd

April 10th, 2021, 14:15

I'm trying unsuccessfully to connect the serial port of a Toshiba MQ01ABD075 750GB 2.5 inch Sata HD using this adapter already successfully used in the past for the same purpose.

The pin configuration of the Hd are shown in this post, the settings used for the Putty terminal are: Baud 9600/38400 , Data Bits 8 , Stop Bits 1 , Parity none , Flow Control none.

The only way I have to power the disk at the moment is through a Usb > Sata adapter and consequently the Sata data port is also connected.

My question: in order to establish a connection with the serial port and read the diagnostic information, does the Sata data port need to be disconnected ?

Re: Establish a serial connection with Toshiba 2.5 inch Sata

April 10th, 2021, 14:18

glhd wrote:My question: in order to establish a connection with the serial port and read the diagnostic information, does the Sata data port need to be disconnected ?
Nope.

Re: Establish a serial connection with Toshiba 2.5 inch Sata

April 10th, 2021, 17:08

That's a 3.3V TTL adaptor. It probably won't work with modern 1.8V TTL levels.

Re: Establish a serial connection with Toshiba 2.5 inch Sata

April 11th, 2021, 13:43

I replaced all connectors and tried to establish a connection with these settings: Speed 9600, Data Bits 8, Stop Bits 1, Parity none, Flow Control none.

When I hit enter key on the Putty window the ">" character appears, which looks like some sort of command prompt, although I'm not sure if this indicates a successfully established serial connection.

Image

I was expecting a long diagnostic output on disk power-up, as experienced in the past with other disks.

Any suggestions ?

Re: Establish a serial connection with Toshiba 2.5 inch Sata

April 11th, 2021, 14:23

It's normal for Toshiba drives. You can start issuing desired commands.

Re: Establish a serial connection with Toshiba 2.5 inch Sata

April 11th, 2021, 16:23

MasterT wrote:... You can start issuing desired commands.

The problem is that I have no idea what commands the disk can accept. I would like to be able to read diagnostic information from the disk. Where can I find a proper reference for commands to be issued via the serial connection?

The 2013 device has 22582 power-on hours, and in december the first signs of wear appeared: Smart diagnostics found 216 pending sectors, which became 624 a few days ago after some read/write tests. In January, 8 reallocated sectors were added. It has now been unused for about three months and luckily there is no data to recover.

Re: Establish a serial connection with Toshiba 2.5 inch Sata

April 11th, 2021, 17:30

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=751

Re: Establish a serial connection with Toshiba 2.5 inch Sata

April 12th, 2021, 7:02

fzabkar wrote:http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=751


Great, thanks :)

The commands are accepted, but there doesn't seem to be anything useful to go beyond Smart diagnostics, and figure out if the problem is affecting the disk surface or a weak/dead head.

Re: Establish a serial connection with Toshiba 2.5 inch Sata

April 15th, 2021, 8:52

glhd wrote: there doesn't seem to be anything useful to go beyond Smart diagnostics, and figure out if the problem is affecting the disk surface or a weak/dead head.

Really ? :shock: :shock: :shock:
Keep learning, boy...

Re: Establish a serial connection with Toshiba 2.5 inch Sata

April 15th, 2021, 19:11

I haven't delved into Toshiba's terminal, but I would start here:

https://forum.ru-board.com/topic.cgi?forum=84&topic=4111#1

Re: Establish a serial connection with Toshiba 2.5 inch Sata

April 16th, 2021, 4:38

BGman wrote:Really ? :shock: :shock: :shock:
Keep learning, boy...

I wasn't expecting to find a specific function telling whether the disk heads are working or not or to see a specific problem diagnosed in the disk electronics, but to be able to infer it from the type of error generated in the output on the screen.

To give you an example, a user of this forum reading the log returned by the serial interface of a Samsung HD, suggested that it could be all the heads failed.

Keep learning, girl ...

fzabkar wrote:I haven't delved into Toshiba's terminal, but I would start here:

https://forum.ru-board.com/topic.cgi?forum=84&topic=4111#1

Thank You.

Re: Establish a serial connection with Toshiba 2.5 inch Sata

April 16th, 2021, 8:26

[quote="glhd"]
Keep learning, girl ...

[/equote]

I have repaired tens of Toshiba drives like yours. How about you?

Re: Establish a serial connection with Toshiba 2.5 inch Sata

April 16th, 2021, 8:32

Samsung != Toshiba.
you won't get such error messages from tosh over serport.

pepe

Re: Establish a serial connection with Toshiba 2.5 inch Sata

May 3rd, 2021, 7:17

Can anyone please tell me if it is possible to read the G-List of a Toshiba hard drive with a command given on the serial interface ?

Re: Establish a serial connection with Toshiba 2.5 inch Sata

May 4th, 2021, 2:34

glhd wrote:Can anyone please tell me if it is possible to read the G-List of a Toshiba hard drive with a command given on the serial interface ?

It is possible, but it's useless....What are you going to do with it? Do you know how to strip the parity bits?

Re: Establish a serial connection with Toshiba 2.5 inch Sata

May 4th, 2021, 2:39

Stripping the parity bits from Toshiba's G-list ...

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=2205

Re: Establish a serial connection with Toshiba 2.5 inch Sata

May 4th, 2021, 13:07

BGman wrote:It is possible, but it's useless....What are you going to do with it?

I've partitioned a disk trying to exclude areas that might contain reallocated sectors (See post).

I would like to understand if the reallocated sectors are actually in the space excluded from partitioning or if some sector is inside the data space.

BGman wrote:Do you know how to strip the parity bits?

I will try with the information in the post mentioned by Fzabkar.

Re: Establish a serial connection with Toshiba 2.5 inch Sata

May 5th, 2021, 1:16

There exist a terminal command that could give an exact answer to your question. If you were more respectful, I would tell you about it.

Re: Establish a serial connection with Toshiba 2.5 inch Sata

May 5th, 2021, 5:03

BGman wrote:There exist a terminal command that could give an exact answer to your question. If you were more respectful, I would tell you about it.

If you give a disrespectful response, expect a disrespectful response.

Forums are meant to help, not to extol your supposed technical superiority through ironic responses to commentary on those asking for help.

The truth is that you don't know any command to read the G-List, if I followed your advice the data on the disk would be irretrievably deleted ...

:tease:
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