| Author | Message | ||
     Danny O'Grady Username: azurlake Registered: N/A |
Hello, I've got a Seagate ST3146807LC SCSI drive whose owner says it's formatted. OK, it could be, but when opening it with winhex, every single byte of the drive, except a couple or a few sectors at the end containing 0x00 and some sparse garbage, is set to 0x6C (ANSI "l"). What does this mean? Which kind of tool can format a drive this way? Could it be some kind of communication/firmware/PCB etc error? I don't get any error with MHDD or any software, everything seems to be OK... I've heard about a similar error in some WD drives containing just "0x66", which is a firmware error, I think. | ||
| Stefan Fleischmann Username: admin Registered: 1-2001 |
Could be a hardware error, yes. > Which kind of tool can format a drive this way? Well, for example WinHex. | ||
| Corrie Theron Username: corrie Registered: N/A |
I have also seen Raid Controllers that format the drives that way..  | ||
| Danny O'Grady Username: azurlake Registered: N/A |
>> Which kind of tool can format a drive this way? > Well, for example WinHex. Sorry, what I was trying to say is "which kind of tool would format a drive this way", I mean, the customer could have formatted it by mistake, but I can't imagine him typing "I want you, my dear controller, to fill it with 0x6C" haha^^ > I have also seen Raid Controllers that format the drives that way.. :-) OK, thank you, so the customer's Raid Controller should be one of those (could you tell me the manufacturer/model, please?). So, I think this is an unrecoverable RAID5, since the customer's RAID failed more than a year ago, and he's been working with a degenerated RAID from then until it finally broke down a few weeks ago. Now he's formatted another drive, so there are two missing disks and all I can do is to fix the broken disk that stopped working a year ago and try to reconstruct something with it, which will be totally a waste of time. Am I right? | ||
| Corrie Theron Username: corrie Registered: N/A |
mmmm, I have seen it with different controllers (IBM, ADAPTEC etc) yip, two failed drives in a RAID 5 is a problem. Using the drive that failed that long ago is definitely gonna be a waste of time and is just gonna give you data corruption.. You can try reconstructing it with the formatted drive rather (if you still have the sequence and other info obviously). You might be able to salvage some of the smaller files (depending on the stripe size) This is quite a challenge and I haven't had substantial results with a situation like this.. Good hunting :D | ||
| Danny O'Grady Username: azurlake Registered: N/A |
Thanks Yep, I've already done that and I've been able to recover some files... it's a 10 disks RAID5, and the point is that broken disks are #4 and #7, so there's no chance to get a file larger than 6 stripes at the most (fortunately the stripe is 128 kB long). If at least the broken drives were #i and #i+1... Anyway, thanks again! |