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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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HDD LLF Tool - Error but unsure what it means.

September 13th, 2021, 10:16

I have used the awesome HDD LLF tool for some time now - and surprised at how quickly it tags along even on external drives.

My one tiny irk is that I cannot see any documentation to explain the errors and although it is usually so breathtakingly simple to use, when it generates an error message, it would be good to know what it means. What I have is this (and many more entries like them)

13/09/2021 14:50:59 Format Error occurred at offset 1,048,576: 5
13/09/2021 14:50:59 Format Error occurred at offset 1,114,112: 5
13/09/2021 14:50:59 Format Error occurred at offset 1,179,648: 5

I appreciate there is an error (!) but the only reason I tried to LLF, is to remove the partitions made by windows AND Linux. Rather than spend too long wondering why neither operating system wanted to get rid of the other's partitions, I just thought I would LLF and start afresh. The drive is only 500GB and not desperately important to keep but it has never shown any sign of issues before (SMART is happy etc) other than this new error today.

If someone could please shed light on what "Error code 5" means, that would be awesome. If it means "bad block / corrupted block etc", I will pop it in the bin - but it seems odd that it was working fine AND SMART is happy.

If I just need to "set a bit" or "tap it gently with a hammer" then it would be nice to keep it as a little external drive for non-critical stuff like movies, music etc.

Apologies if there *IS* a manual or an explanation of the error codes, but I couldn't find it.

Thank you.

Guy

Re: HDD LLF Tool - Error but unsure what it means.

September 14th, 2021, 0:32

I haven't used it, but I wonder if it is actually error code 5, but instead it is a format error, and the : 5 means 5 retries? ICBW tho, but just going by the syntax there it seems.. logical (*boom* *boom*)
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