Failing hard drive

[registereduser]

I know the easiest solution is to buy a new one, and I did. I am trying to restore the sectors health of my seagate external goflex usb drive which got too close to my speakers and damaged the magnetic platters from the em field of the speaker's ( oops ) no data of importance is on the drive, it's out of RMA warranty and this is only for hobby/curiocity

One problem i have is that it keeps self-shutting down after failing to read/write certain sectors.

After forcing dd to write zeros to some sectors, they do come back to full usage, but then the drive shuts off and I have to unplug it and plug it back in to try again on new sectors. I believe seagate built drives to shut down when having trouble to prevent further data loss but it's actually hindering possible repair. I've tried using the /sys/class/scsi_host/host6/scan code to rescan the drive but it doesn't work, so I have to keep unplugging it.

Does anyone know of a way to prevent these drives from shutting themselves off? Or a way to re-sca n from a software level so that I don't have to keep unplugging it?

Thanks!

[Mute Ant]

o Loudspeakers are designed to pass their magnetic field through the voice coil, not spray it externally, so damage to a magnetic drive is not high on the list of hazards. Here's someone who tried it with an unmounted loudspeaker magnet with no effect...
https://superuser.com/questions/568336/ ... -hard-disk

o Mechanical disk drives already have an intense permanent magnetic field right next to them, running through the head actuator coil. The disk sectors are in and out of any stray field 70 times a second, for years.

o Drives do not normally shut down if there's a write error, they remap any bad sectors and carry on.

Taken together, I suspect the drive electronics, specifically a bad power supply, which is often replaceable, or just an excessive length of cheap cable.

[registereduser]

The permanent magnets are harmless to the drive in their location due to the location of the field and direction being contained by the mu-metal(?) magnetic shielding back plate.

Hard drives are very vulnerable to the electromagnetic field of non shielded Chinese speakers (which i have)

I suspect if hard drive manufacturers made the drive casing out of mu-metal it would protect the drive.

I've already ruled out mechanical failure by reviving several thousand sectors, some were remapped but I think the drive ran out of spare sectors.

[Pierre]

that running out of spare / unused sectors does sound like the most likely reason,
for your issue, though.

if you have the Time & Software, then a Low level Format, which is similar to the Original Factory Formatting,
has been known to revive an unstable drive, but it is both Time consuming and risky to do.
& you also would need to Remove Any Data on it, obviously, before attempting anything.

[registereduser]

To my knowledge, low level formatting is no longer possible on modern drives, the closest thing to it is a zero fill eraser. I've been doing this but it keeps turning off, which is why I was wondering if there was a command to force the drive to wake back up. Like if you go into disks and tell the drive to power off, what's a method to power it back on via command?

Thank you for the ideas and reply.

[Mute Ant]

Modern drives have their own sort-of-low-level format built in... Secure Erase or Sanitize Block is the closest we can get to actually writing to every (working) sector. The standard GNU tool for that is the hdparm program, but it's so easy to get the wrong drive. I would try the Disks accessory first.

When your problem drive switches itself off, does it disappear from the list of Linux devices too? The /dev/sda /dev/sdb list. The lsblk command will show you what drives are seen by the kernel. If the damaged drive disappears, it's not something that software can help with, the connection is simply not there any more.

man hdparm will show you all the IDE commands that your drive might support. If you intend to try any of them, I suggest you do it using a Live Session with only the problem-drive connected.

[phd21]

Hi "registereduser",

I just read your post and the good replies to it. Here are my thoughts on this as well.

You can check drives using the partition managers and console terminal commands, If there is nothing on drive you can format it, and that should cover bad sectors and maybe the drive can be used, if the drive is not worn out and failing.

You can install the "smartmontools", "smart-notifier", "gsmartcontrol", and check the drive and possibly change some settings like turn off the power saving mode. If you search for the drive's manufacturer (seagate, WD, western digital, etc...) in the Software Manager or Synaptic Package Manager (SPM), there might be other tools as well.

You can also use various drive and Linux "forensic" tools to copy and or recover folders, files, even partitions. "Safecopy", "testdisk" and its photorec, etc... Search for "Forensic" and "recover" in the Synaptic Package Manager (SPM).

Previous post: Testing a hard disk
viewtopic.php?f=90&t=220217&hilit=gsmartcontrol

Drive testing
viewtopic.php?f=47&t=199705&hilit=gsmartcontrol

Hope this helps ...