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Is it possible for S.M.A.R.T. to give false readings (say I was fiddling with lots of recovery programs, transfers, so on and so forth) or is it absolutely a read-only direct correlation to the physical status of a drive?
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Does SpinRite level 5 "recover bad sectors" operate on those marked at the factory? Are they on the same level as your generic bad sector, with SpinRite thus having full access?
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The main firmware of (many?) drives, like a WD Passport is stored on the platter. How is it protected? Might SpinRite's sector recovery corrupt it?
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Is the failure of a drive to report valid identity information (
hdparm -I /dev/xx
) consistent with corrupted firmware, or just general disk failure? I may be misunderstanding the role of firmware here. I feel I've read a drive's identity information is on the platter, just like the partition tables and so on. Is this true?
Bad sectors, S.M.A.R.T., SpinRite, firmware on platter and drive id questions
bad-blocksdata-recoverysmart
Best Answer
Smart records a large number of values on the disk. For each value there is a limit before errors are reported. If you are getting smart errors your disk is most likely in a bad shape, but smart is not guaranteed to give a warning. Some types of abuse (starting and shutting down the disk very often) can give early smart errors.
I don't know what interface SpinRite uses against the disk. There are on some disks a factory interface used when producing the disks, but I don't think the disks exposes this without special hardware. Otherwise it can only read/write the standard drive parameters, and not easily access blocks marked as bad by the firmware.
No disk (after IDE) stores the whole firmware on platter. Because it needs a firmware to read the platter. Disks before IDE/SCSI some times did not have firmware. I see no reason to store firmware on platter.
The information about the disk geometry and such is stored in firmware on chip. Failure to report it can be a sign of a dead disk, but also communication problems with the disk (for example a master/slave conflict).
If the disk can't report geometry you will usually not be able to read it anyway. In those cases I typically recommend restoring from backup... Because you do have backup, right?