john2 wrote:

Tim S wrote:
john2 wrote:


Well if its a Samsung HDD I wouldn't bother partitioning it at all.
Formatting with Fdisk will destroy their weird low level format and only
Samsung can recover it, as many users have found.

john2


Any disk that does that is broken and needs returning...

I put the drive number into Google and found a lot of people globally
who had exactly the same problem. Samsung don't publish any data on
heads, cylinders sectors etc for this model so it may be a much bigger
drive, or one of several bigger drives, which had a lot of duff sectors
that they've low level programmed within the controller to avoid.

I worked fine until I tried to reformat it....


Do you mean "low level reformat" or "make a filesystem/format"?

Partitioning and making filesystems are high level operations. The computer
will ask the drive "how many blocks do you have" and it will expect them
all to work (assuming LBA mode).

Fdisk does nothing more than write to the first logical sector (512 bytes)
on the drive a copy of the MS DOS format partition table and, occasionally,
depending on invocation/version of fdisk, a copy of the MBR.

If the drive goes pear shaped having the first sector written to, then it is
broken. No debate. It does not work as expected, and if it were mine, it
would be returned forthwith. Presumable Samsung screwed up badly?

Some people don't even use partitions, I have on occasion given the whole
disk (raw) over to a filesystem or a higher level volume manager like EVMS.

This (generally, not you John) is starting to remind me of my discussions
with SanDisk this weekend past, over a failed CF card.

Me: mails SanDisk, requesting an RMA under the 5 year guarantee due to 67xx
bad blocks on the device appearing...

Them: Please can you use Windows XP to delete/recreate partition and
reformat the filesystem.

Me: No I don't have any MS product available on a system with a CF card
reader. I use linux. I have performed the equivalent operations with fdisk
and mkfs.vfat Oddly enough it doesn't work any better. BTW, were you hoping
the mkfs operation would take note of the bad blocks and hide them at the
FS layer, because that is not acceptable. Either the device hides them at
the hardware layer or you give me a new device.

Them: Repeat 1st line support bull**** about Win XP...

Me: Gets on the phone, gives them a short lecture and is immediately given
the contact numbers of 3 UK distributors who can handle RMAs. 3 days later
I have a new device. Why they had to make a simple thing hard I don't know,
but they probably regretted doing it to me whilst I am giving up smoking
because I don't currently have a lot of patience in the face of
stupidity...

Cheers

Tim