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Repairing bad sectors in an external drive
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this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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You should be able to use smartctl on a USB drive. I've never had an issue anyway. You may need to specify the transport type tho. I had a drive that it couldn't figure out on its own, but since it was an sata drive in an external enclosure, atapi is the transport protocol to use
Using the same switch you can run a long test. It's sort of a pain as it will kill the test on finding a bad sector. But you can take that sector number and plug it into hdparm to rewrite the sector hoping it will remap it. You won't be able to recover the data in a bad sector, But There are these extra sectors on the drive that firmware can replace the bad one with. It does this on a forced write command.Something along the lines of
Again, you have data loss, you can't go back to no loss. All you can do is rescue anything important. You may (probably) need to run a long smartctl test again, and fix another sector. I have saved data off of drives with 100+ bad sectors this way... It's tedious and eventually I scripted it but it does work.
Older/shittier enclosures don’t support smart pass through. But this is an issue that’s largely been fixed for 10+ years at this point so I’m surprised op has this.
The funny thing is that the cheaper throwaway enclosure i bought supports smart pass through but the newer sata 3 capable connector does not. I am as surprised as you that this turned out to be the issue
thanks for the help but i am unfortunately getting a
Read Device Identity failed: scsi error unsupported field in scsi commanderror for that particular drive. A different external drive also in an enclosure returns the appropriate information. I used thesmartctl --scancommand to find out the device types in both cases (both aresat)Can you plug the drive in directly and test it? You might also just have a dead drive. Either way if you were planning on using it as a backup medium I would tell you it's probably not a good idea. If you are trying to recover data from it, good luck. Is it making any sound? You could try buying the same, old but good hard drive and swapping the control board on it. You may also have to swap the nvram chip on it to make sure you have the same sector mappings. Either way there is a lot of stuff you can try, but hopefully this is an educational experience for you (as in learning how to recover a dead drive, not as in learning about the need for proper backup methods) as opposed to a desperate attempt to recover data that is most likely unrecoverable.