"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
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?

Thanks,
DoN.

Your problem is way above my pay grade. I fell (or was pushed) into
some SCSI once but wiggled out as qiuckly as I could.

IIRC it was Windows 2000. The MS CheckDisk utility with the /r switch
may be as good.

When I was using Sun workstations the IT department wouldn't let me
play around inside them, the fear in their eyes revealed that they
knew too well what I could do.
jsw the usurperuser