Hi friends. I am trying to find some strategies for repairing HDDs with bad sectors, of course, for reusing then without important data on its. So i have 3 main questions:

1) Set min lba address?

Using Set Max LBA o HPA command you can set the ending LBA address of user partition. My question is: exist min LBA address command, in other words, any way to set another starting sector number than 0? For example, to hide differents zones where bad sectors are located.

2) Move Glist to Plist?.

For WD HDDs with WDR demo there is a command to move glist to plist. My question is: How to do this for seagate via terminal command? Is the F3 A>P command correct? How many sectors can be stored in plist?

3) Clearing smart tool?.

Exists any free tool to clear smart on samsung, maxtor and hitachi hdd?

thanks in advance,
Oleg

thanks spildit!

Well, sorry, i was out a few days, and back to the topic.

About question 1 i knew that HPA work in the ways Spildit says, HPA reference was only an example, the real question is if exist any way to set another starting lba number than 0, or if is posible to reverse hdd addressing starting from the end of disk.

About creating partition leaving non desire region unused not always work, because some times hdd continues reallocating bad sectors of damaged area decreasing the transfer speed.

Spildit, can you explain something more about the F3 A>P command effect?

thank in advance,
Oleg.

You might like to investigate the Address-Offset ATA feature:

http://www.t13.org/documents/UploadedDo ... 8123r0.pdf

Note that the above proposal is a little different to the description in the following article, so you might need to do a little experimenting:

https://www.utica.edu/academic/institut ... 4A2671.pdf

AIUI, HDAT2 supports Address-Offset:
http://www.hdat2.com

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Well, thanks Spildit and Fzabkar, i will investigate your suggestions, but the needs of firmware tools is bad for me.