Hello everyone:

I have a 2.5" HDD from toshiba: a MK5076GSX drive. The drive seems to work fine (power up, bios recognizes it and do not make any clicking noise), but the operating system see the partitions but as unformatted partitions.

In Linux is more or less the same, if I look to the dmesg I see a lot of DRDY errors (see image attached).

I were able to find another identical disk to use it as a donor disk but I'm not sure what can be wrong here. I got the donor disk in advance expecting a power failure or electronic failure but now I'm not sure what can be wrong in this case.

any advice is appreciated

Thanks!

Can you retrieve a SMART report with a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo? Look for reallocated, pending or uncorrectable sectors.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thank you for your reply!

I totally miss something obvious like checking the SMART info on the original drive, I did in the case of the donor drive to check that was a healthy drive (it was second hand) but not in the case of the original.

However, it seems that is unable to check the smart info. It detects some info regarding the firmware anda model but not the smart data, see the picture attached (it is Disk #2 in the disk administrator). Can this be a symptom of an electronic failure? is the smart info stored in the rom or in the plates?

Also, I found a firmware update for this drive, but in this state I don't know if it is a good idea to perform it and the changelog does not seem to fix anything that can cause this issue. https://www.dell.com/support/home/es-es/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=fp21c

Thanks a lot!

Quick update:

After leaving the disk connected for like an hour it seems that it was able to retrieve the SMART values and indeed there are problems with "pending sectors", the rest of the smart values seems to be on acceptable levels.

Any idea on how to proceed with this?

thanks!

Not a problem with the PCB.

Damaged/degraded head/s and/or damaged sectors.
If you continue to test the disk for a long time, the number of damaged sectors will increase considerably = data loss (at least part).

Will probably need to change the head block.

The Reported Uncorrectable Errors attribute is very bad.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Glist is probably overflowing. You need a pc3k to bypass this for imaging.