"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
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Unfortunately, they were from an IBM RAID setup, and had been
formatted with 520 byte sectors, instead of the standard 512 byte
ones.

I've dealt with converting 36 GB and 73 GB ones with the same
problems, but these are fighting me all the way home.

I've been bouncing back and forth between Sun's Solaris 10 and
Ubuntu linux trying different tools to try to get them working. No
luck
so far, though I have six converted to 512 byte sectors, they won't
accept a label, because the bad block tables are gone.

It would really be nice to have them usable, to replace the 36GB
and 73GB drives in various software RAID arrays.

Enjoy,
DoN.

When I called drive support asking how to reset the P-list, to reclaim
spare sectors on the huge G-list, they said it could only be done on
their custom hardware, because of the embedded servo tracks I couldn't
access.

http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/hard-drive-defects-table/
"Although data operations are automatically redirected to uncorrupted
sectors, the G-list table does reduce drive access speed and it may
become necessary to replace the drive."

I think the drive slows down because the replacement sectors are on
different tracks so accessing them requires a head seek.

However the reformat that's part of installing Windows made a
Reallocated Sector Count of several hundred thousand disappear, and
the bad section no longer slows down in the HD Tune read speed
benchmark tests.

Radio Shack dumped their IOMega Prestige 1T USB drives recently for
$33.97. I found out why after buying one, they are Advanced Format
with 4k sectors and neither XP nor Win7 32bit would read it. But 7 x64
could, and once it had been cracked open so could the others.
jsw