Hacking a failed Seagate 4TB drive for fun and education

[philip_rhoades]

People,

I am glad I found this site! - over the decades I have often wondered if a forum like this existed every time a HD failed - but have only just decided to look for it . .

I have used gddrescue to recover data from this:

ST4000DM000-1F2168__Z303S8AV_4.00_TB

- which failed too quickly for me notice there was a problem but now I want to do some software hacking on it before turn it into a desktop sanding machine or something . .

Currently, my Fedora 34 Linux OS can see the drive on first boot as /dev/sdc but after a doing stuff on it which eventually results in ATA and I/O errors, the drive goes off-line (there is no clicking that I can hear). I am thinking that if I reboot and not do any WRITING to the drive, that it might stay visiible for longer. Then, if that is the case, I might try using dd to read one sector at a time (in a shell script loop) to see what happens . .

Anyone else got any suggestions for hacking fun / interesting stuff? I am assuming it is a hardware problem and that the drive will eventually die completely, but any more info I can find out about the drive and what I can do with it for my own HD education would be appreciated!

Regards,

Phil.

[fzabkar]

This is a backup of the HDD Oracle web site (thanks @maximus):

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1CD8h7q9cYNVCltqB87-kSBzMRnq3-yU6?usp=sharing (3GB)

[Setlec]

Did the HDD Oracle messed up their forum update?

[HddDonorMarket]

This is a backup of the HDD Oracle web site (thanks @maximus):

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1CD8h7q9cYNVCltqB87-kSBzMRnq3-yU6?usp=sharing (3GB)

Perfect. Thanks for sharing. But is Hddoracle closed?

[philip_rhoades]

People,

Since my original post I have been experimenting with reading and writing different size blocks and different numbers of blocks with dd. As I have been doing this, this drive is continually accumulating more problems according to smart:

Code:

ST4000DM000-1F2168__Z303S8AV_4.00_TB_20210720_171228.smartctl:ATA Error Count: 1
ST4000DM000-1F2168__Z303S8AV_4.00_TB_20210720_204309.smartctl:ATA Error Count: 7 (device log contains only the most recent five errors)
ST4000DM000-1F2168__Z303S8AV_4.00_TB_20210722_192810.smartctl:ATA Error Count: 1683 (device log contains only the most recent five errors)
ST4000DM000-1F2168__Z303S8AV_4.00_TB_20210722_223633.smartctl:ATA Error Count: 1684 (device log contains only the most recent five errors)
ST4000DM000-1F2168__Z303S8AV_4.00_TB_20210723_003759.smartctl:ATA Error Count: 1750 (device log contains only the most recent five errors)
ST4000DM000-1F2168__Z303S8AV_4.00_TB_20210723_173231.smartctl:ATA Error Count: 1750 (device log contains only the most recent five errors)
ST4000DM000-1F2168__Z303S8AV_4.00_TB_20210818_040030.smartctl:ATA Error Count: 8937 (device log contains only the most recent five errors)
ST4000DM000-1F2168__Z303S8AV_4.00_TB_20210819_105934.smartctl:ATA Error Count: 8953 (device log contains only the most recent five errors)
ST4000DM000-1F2168__Z303S8AV_4.00_TB_20210820_011603.smartctl:ATA Error Count: 9681 (device log contains only the most recent five errors)
ST4000DM000-1F2168__Z303S8AV_4.00_TB_20210821_113124.smartctl:ATA Error Count: 12042 (device log contains only the most recent five errors)


Phil.

[philip_rhoades]

Update to my last post - the disk was first tested:

ST4000DM000-1F2168__Z303S8AV_4.00_TB_20180302.smartctl

with no errors . .