Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[kadamssg]

Hi, I'm having trouble with a new Barracuda 1.5TB SATA drive. Started receiving "Bad Block" errors in the Windows logs, so I ran chkdsk to fix, but it didn't fix anything. So I next installed SeaTools for Windows and tried to run the long generic test, and that failed shortly into the test (and doesn't provide an option to fix, what a pain!). So, I then downloaded SeaTools for DOS and created a CD. I booted from that, but it doesn't detect any of my large SATA drives. It finds my 500GB SATA drive just fine, but doesn't list any of my 1TB drives, or my new 1.5TB drive. So, it can't fix what it can't see. The on-board VIA controller doesn't recognize drives that large, so I'm using an add-in SATA controller for the larger drives, which are detected at boot-up just fine by the controller's BIOS, and Windows sees them just fine, but not in DOS. I'm assuming that it's a driver issue at the moment, but I have not been able to locate a DOS driver. The controller is using an Sil3114 chip set. Any ideas or thoughts would be welcome, since if I can't fix it I will have to ship it back, which will be a real pain for just a few bad blocks!

Thanks!

[graham.k]

You're probably best to RMA the drive, if it's failing SeaTools tests.

[fzabkar]

I found the following text strings inside the seatools.exe executable (after decompressing it with UPX):

Ctlr_SA Ctlr_SA_SI_3112 Ctlr_SA_SI_3124 Ctlr_SA_Promise_20318 Ctlr_SA_Promise_20375 Ctlr_SA_Promise_20579 Ctlr_SA_Promise_40518 Ctlr_SA_Promise_20575 Ctlr_SA_Promise_20570 Ctlr_SA_Promise_81518 Ctlr_SA_Intel_ICH5 Ctlr_SA_Intel_ICH6 Ctlr_SA_Intel_ICH8 Ctlr_SA_Intel_ESB2 Ctlr_SA_ULi Ctlr_SA_Serverworks_Frodo Ctlr_SA_VIA8237 Ctlr_SA_SIS

ATI 4379 Promise PDC20246 Promise PDC20262 Promise PDC20266/PDC20267 Promise PDC20268 Promise PDC20270 Promise PDC20269 Promise PDC20318 Promise PDC20319 Promise PDC20375 Promise PDC20371 Promise PDC20376 Promise PDC40515 Promise 779 Promise PDC40519 Promise PDC20579 Promise PDC20571 Promise PDC20570 Promise PDC20573 Promise PDC20574 Promise PDC20575 Promise PDC40517 Promise PDC40518 Promise PDC81518 CMD PCI646U CMD PCI648 CMD PCI649 SiI 0680 SiI 3112 SiI 3124 SiI 3132 SiI 3512 ULi M1573 SATA RAID ULi M1575 SATA RAID HighPoint HPT366 Primary HighPoint HPT366 Secondary HighPoint HPT370 HighPoint HPT372A HighPoint HPT302 HighPoint HPT371 HighPoint HPT374 ACard ATP865 Intel ICH5 Intel ICH5R Intel ICH6 Intel ICH6R Intel ICH6M Intel ICH6MR Intel ICH7 Intel ICH7R Intel ICH8 Intel ICH8R Intel ICH8-4 SiS 963 SiS SATA RAID 180 ServerWorks CSB5 ServerWorks Frodo VIA 8237 nVidia MCP/MCP-D nVidia MCP04 nVidia MCP04 SATA nVidia MCP-T nVidia nForce3 nVidia nForce3 SATA nVidia nForce4 nVidia nForce4 SATA nVidia MCP51 PATA nVidia MCP51 SATA nVidia MCP55 SATA Generic PCI ATA

There is no mention of the SiI 3114 chip.

[Cantbecanit]

Need to see some system specs mate, I suspect you have a latest tech drive on an oldish board?

Can you find your MB model number and the sata card post it, it'll save a lot of time if we know a bit about what you are running it on.

Message Edited by Cantbecanit on 09-27-2009 03:07 AM

[fzabkar]

If SeaTools for Windows reports the failing sector number (LBA), then you can refer to the following information to determine which file occupies that sector:

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&thread.id=15364

If the data within that file are important to you, then use Bad Block Copy to make a backup of those sectors that are readable.

Alternatively, you can delete the corrupt file and replace it with a backup copy. This should free up those sectors occupied by the file. Next time Windows tries to write to the bad sector, the drive's inbuilt SMART routines should remap this faulty sector with a good spare.

A SMART diagnostic tool such as HD Sentinel will probably show at least one sector "pending reallocation":

http://www.hdsentinel.com/dl.php

This article explains the SMART attributes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Known_ATA_S.M.A.R.T._attributes

BTW, when your 1TB and 1.5TB drives were connected to your motherboard's VIA SATA controller, did you try limiting the interface speed to 1.5Gbps with a jumper?

Message Edited by fzabkar on 01-10-2009 10:19 AM

[kadamssg]

Thanks fzabkar, that explains a lot. It figures that they would support almost every other SiI chipset other than the 3114!! That makes diagnosis and repair extremely dificult since I can't do it in this system. That only leaves me a couple of options. 1. Move the drive to another system that has a chipset that SeaTools supports, or 2. Go buy a different controller just to allow SeaTools to diagnose and repair my Seagate drives (not likely to happen, considering that the controller works perfectly in every respect with my other drives and with Windows!).

The really frustrating thing is that the other drive manufacturers utilities work just fine with this conroller. The IBM/Hitachi utility for example will boot up and see every drive in the system and even scan my Seagate drives, but of course won't repair anything but an IBM/Hitachi drive. Very frustrating. This is now my fourth Seagate drive to fail. My Samsung drives just keep humming.

Yes, Cantbecanit, it is an older board and controller. But as mentioned above, they both work flawlessly apart from the SeaTools issue, so I'm not going to retire them for that. This system is my domain croller/DVR/file server, so it doesn't have to be the greatest, just serve up files to the rest of the network clients, and it's little 2.6GHz Athlon processor does this just fine with plenty of cycles left over. I was just hoping that there was an easy fix to my delima, but alas it appears that it was not meant to be.

Thanks to all for your help.

[fzabkar]

I don't believe SeaTools can "repair" any bad sectors. The term is probably a misnomer. Instead, I expect that SeaTools repetitively reads a marginal sector until it achieves one good read, at which time the drive's CPU automatically takes the sector out of service and replaces it with a spare. You should see an increase in SMART's reallocated sector count every time this happens. If a sector is totally uncorrectable, then SeaTools will report that it was unable to repair it. In order for such a sector to be "repaired", the OS must write new data to it. The drive's CPU then knows that the old unreadable data can be discarded, in which case it retires the faulty sector and writes the new data to a spare.

You can force a bad sector to be retired by deleting the file that owns it, and then restoring the file from a backup. The next time the OS tries to write to the faulty sector, the drive will transparently remap it.