Hi I have a 200GB WD2000BB that is out of warranty now and is giving SMART errors (Reallocated Sectors Count - 161)

I have erased/zero'd/scanned the drive with MHDD.

Is it possible to clear out these remapped sectors from the spare area and rescan this?

I'm not concerned about losing drive size and I'm not planning on running an OS or anything off of this drive. Just want it merely for additional storage space and won't be putting anything I'm concerned about losing on it.

Any suggestions would be great.

Thanks

OK, so how do I go about clearing the g-list/p-list then? That PC3000 is out of the question, but I did read elsewhere that a program called HDD Repair 1.1 will also do this on WD drives.

However, I'm not really sure where to find that software or even if that is the correct name of it. After searching around a little, it seems that there are a few different programs with names similar to that.

Anyone know who makes this software or where to get it?

It's OK. Sectors are remapped and you can't access them.
I would back all valuable data from it regularly though.

Yeah I guess I will just have to disable SMART on the drive to avoid the errors on startup, as I don't see there being any kind of way of clearing the SMART reallocation counts.

I did find HD Repair 2.0, but I'm not sure I'm using it right, since there's no documentation and the only place I see anything about P-List/G-List stuff shows up under a tab that says 'Maxtor'. Also, the drive only shows up as 137GB under that program, so I'm not even sure if it supports 48-bit LBA.

Oh well...no big deal I guess, but if anyone has anything else to add, I'd appreciate that too.

Thanks

Small correction here.

The reallocation count is at 116 (not 161), threshold is 140. I'm assuming the reallocation count will go down as the remaps go up. Hence, I'm 24 'points' past the threshold.

Currently I'm running a Level 5 scan with Spinrite6 on the drive. I wonder if it will remove some of those remaps if it finds the sectors to be good (and hopefully update the SMART count)

[quote="SpilditYour only chance is to copy your G-List to the P-List and clear the G-List, but you will not be able to do this with Spinrite.[/quote]

And U will not be able to recover anything after that because of the shifts it causes

pepe

There is nothing to recover on the drive..It is empty.

I'm really just interested in using it as a secondary storage drive for non-critical stuff. I figured I would put it to use rather than just trash a 200GB drive that seems to be fine (other than the SMART errors.)

As far as the transferring the G-list to the P-list, and then clearing the g-list...how do I go about doing that? Will that take away the SMART errors?

I'm certainly not gonna buy PC3000 to fix this one drive. I do have HD Repair 2.0, but I'm not really sure how to use it. My drive only shows up as 137GB in HD Repair, not really sure if that matters or not. (Shows up as 186GB in Windows though, so it's not a problem with the OS and the 48-bit LBA)

Is there any other software that can accomplish this G-List/P-List stuff or even reset the SMART attributes?

By the way, I really appreciate the time you all are taking to replay. Thanks.

I haven't read all the posts again...

However I cannot suggest any 'free' solution to do this job.
I see 2 ways:
Have somebody to do the job, or
Sell the drive as spare parts to somebody who can use it.

pepe

You can use it in USB enclosure no problem.