Hi,

While back I got this Samsung HD204UI drive (this is the generation which was made by seagate under the Samsung name, right?). At first it was completely unresponsive, SMART revealed some bad sectors (around 10). Formatted it using the HDD LLF tool and all the errors went away (even in the reallocated sector count, which is weird) and it became responsive. Tried to install windows XP on it for testing purposes but it became corrupted.

Ran CDI again and this time, the errors came back, albeit in a larger quantity. So I did a full format from windows on it but I needed to cancel it on 4% since I wanted to try HDDscan tool but that PC had some weird ass Nvidia SATA controller which listed the drives as SCSI.

Now I am on an PC which detects the drives normally, but when I tried to format it I got . I tried to run surface scan under HDDscan, but that gave me The parameters were detected and entered correctly (LBA=3907029168).

I have no idea what happened here. I can still do a LLF using the LLF tool no problem, but I cannot create a new partition. Can't be bad heads since then the LLF would fail, correct? FW corruption?

Any ideas?

Try Victoria, ideally in DOS, so Windows does not communicate with the drive.
Look at the bad sectors pattern. If there is a huge chunk showing consecutive bad sectors, then it is a head issue.
Try the same test in the middle and toward to rear of the drive to confirm.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

So, for some reason now I can format it and create a new partition (fast format). Unfortunately there's a big block of errors in the middle, which would point to the head 1 being bad.

Gonna do more tests before I can go cut the head.