On 2013-06-14, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
...
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.
[ ... ]
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.
O.K. THe P-list must be what the Hitachi manual for the drives
describes as "skip"s. Each sector has information to move to the next
*good* sector, skipping over the intermediate bad ones.
The "G-list" is probably what Sun reserves two cylinders at the
end of the drive for -- a pool of spare sectors to use as needed to
replace sectors which go bad over time.
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.
There's no way that I can use the Windows format to fix this,
however. the only systems which I Have with the FC-AL drive slots are
equipped with UltraSPARC CPUs, which Windows has no idea what to do
with. :-(
I guess that if I got a PCI card which was a host adaptor for
the FC-AL drives, (Fibre Channel -- Arbitrated List) and the proper
drivers, I could use a Windows box -- after converting a spare drive bay
(two slots) out of a damaged Sun Blade 1000 to hold the drives). I may
have to do that. Which flavor of Windows was this?
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.
USB isn't much use in the RAID arrays where I want to use these
drives.
Thanks,
DoN.
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