0

A friend of mine gave me his external 2TB Seagate HDD which appeared to be somewhat faulty. And, it is indeed pretty faulty.

First, I did try a lot of "common" commands, spent a few hours googling stuff, tried Linux and Windows (for chkdsk), opened the HDD case to plug it directly in SATA and I'll add that I do not need to recover the data, I just need to format it.

lsblk

NAME         MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda            8:0    0   1,8T  0 disk

Here, sda is the disk, its size, 1,8T seems correct.

In GParted, the disk only appears to be ~1.9GB. I can create a partition table but I cannot create a valid partition. And even if I could, it could only be 1.9GB.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

dd: error writing '/dev/sda': No space left on device
3782129+0 records in
3782128+0 records out
1936449536 bytes (1,9 GB, 1,8 GiB) copied, 7,04022 s, 275 MB/s

smartctl -a /dev/sda

Read Device Identity failed: Invalid argument

parted -l

Error: Unable to open /dev/sda - unrecognised disk label.   
Model:  (file)                                                           
Disk /dev/sda : 1936MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition table : unknown

dmesg

[ 7925.612174] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Synchronizing SCSI cache
[ 7925.862625] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Synchronize Cache(10) failed: Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
[ 7931.193045] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] 3809353968 512-byte logical blocks: (1.95 TB/1.77 TiB)
[ 7931.193049] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] 4096-byte physical blocks
[ 7931.193313] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[ 7931.193316] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 2f 00 00 00
[ 7931.193593] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 7931.193995] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Optimal transfer size 33553920 bytes not a multiple of physical block size (4096 bytes)
[ 7931.390515] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#18 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
[ 7931.390523] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#18 Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] 
[ 7931.390529] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#18 Add. Sense: Invalid command operation code
[ 7931.390536] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#18 CDB: Read(6) 08 00 00 00 08 00
[ 7931.390545] blk_update_request: critical target error, dev sda, sector 0 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x0 phys_seg 1 prio class 0
[ 7931.390558] Buffer I/O error on dev sda, logical block 0, async page read
[ 7931.500384] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#19 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
[ 7931.500451] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#19 Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] 
[ 7931.500461] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#19 Add. Sense: Invalid command operation code
[ 7931.500472] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#19 CDB: Read(6) 08 00 00 00 08 00

Do you have any idea? I guess the HDD may be dead, but I'm not quite sure.
What I find intriguing is the 1.8TB size with lsblk and 1.9GB elsewhere.
And again, I do not need to recover previous data (and since I did write a lot of 0's, they're probably gone for good :p). I just want to format the disk to make it usable again.

Thanks for your time :)

Pablo
  • 1
  • 1
    Was this hard drive sitting next to some unshielded speakers? Sounds like the blocks are completely messed up and the platters disagree with the firmware. Even if you could create a 1.8TB partition, it would never be trustworthy enough to invest the time on. Send it to the recyclers – matigo Jun 30 '21 at 10:57
  • 1
    Did you try to read SMART data from disk? See this for example: https://askubuntu.com/questions/528072/how-can-i-check-the-smart-status-of-a-ssd-or-hdd-on-current-versions-of-ubuntu-1 – FedKad Jun 30 '21 at 10:59
  • @matigo No idea, but yeah it does look like he's ready to leave this earth :( – Pablo Jun 30 '21 at 11:13
  • @FedonKadifeli SMART data aren't accessible, see my output for smartctl. – Pablo Jun 30 '21 at 11:14
  • This seems to fix the DID_ERROR: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/525290/usb-hdd-not-found – Rinzwind Jun 30 '21 at 11:17
  • Make sure this drive is not in read-only mode, aka harddisk bios password, or something else. – paladin Jun 30 '21 at 11:35
  • @paladin sadly it's not, as you can see in dmesg output [ 7931.193313] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off – Pablo Jun 30 '21 at 11:38
  • Try to disable the disk cache of this harddisk. Has this drive hardware encryption? If so, try to disable hardware encryption. – paladin Jun 30 '21 at 11:43

0 Answers0