[SGVLUG] FW: Hard drive question

[Claude Felizardo]

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 11:03 AM, Matt Campbell <dvdmatt at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This was sent a couple of weeks ago, but was rejected by the server, anyone
> have any suggestions?
>
> Matt
>
> From: Matthew Campbell
>  Sent: Monday, February 25, 2008 1:02 AM
>  To: 'SGVLUG Discussion List.'
>  Subject: Hard drive question
>
> I have an interesting problem I have been struggling with.
>
> I have a 260G LaCie USB drive that I have been using under Windows for some
> time.
>
> I had a data error on it, so I tried to format the drive.  I get the message
> "Format didn't complete successfully".  When I try and copy data to the
> drive I get a "write failed" error around 11% of the way through the copy.
>
> I can fdisk, mkfs.exxt3 and copy 100Gig to it fine under Linux.
>
> I can delete that partition under windows, but when I try and create a new
> partition it fails immediately.
>
> I would like to transfer some video files to a Windows user with this drive.
> I could DOS format the drive, but then it couldn't handle the large video
> files.
>
> I don't think I can format the drive NTFS under Linux.
>
> As far as I know there is no longer such a thing as a low level hard drive
> format.
>
> So, what are my options?
>
> Is there a file system I can create under Linux which can handle large files
> that the DOS user can read?
>
> Is there a way to recover this drive so that it can be partitioned or
> formatted under Windoze?  Would wiping the partition table allow Windows to
> start fresh?
>
> Is there a utility under Linux that can rescan the drive and mark any new
> bad sectors?  Is this what could be tripping up the Windows format?
>
> Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
>
> Matt

I really don't like external USB drives because you can't check the
status of the drive.  It could be getting soft errors until it runs
out of spare sectors then it's toast.

First guess, I'd say windows doesn't like the partition table.  What
does fdisk -l /dev/sd? report?

Using Linux, you could delete all the partitions and then create one
big partition and format it and have it check for bad sectors.  Use
FAT32.  On my desktop here at work, I use partition id 0x0b which
fdisk reports as "W95 FAT32".  Largest file size for FAT32 is 4 GB I
think.

Otherwise, you could use Linux to wipe out the partition table or
possibly create the NTFS partition but let windows do the formatting.

However its sounds like the drive may have issues.  If possible, I'd
put it into a desktop and try and use spinrite to perform a low level
format.  Catch is it requires DOS/windoze and you must have a valid
partition table.  I've used it to bring a marginal disk back to life
but the drive would usually fail within a few years.

I also used to use partition magic 8 (yet another dos/windoze tool)
and it works fine for FAT32 and ext2/3 partitions but it has issues
with NFTS.  I really wish they'd update that tool but there's been no
updates since symantec/norton bought them out.

If anyone has used comparable Linux tools, I'd like to hear about it.

claude