Maxtor Hard Drive, FreeBSD
I purchased a 200GB Maxtor 6Y200P0 hard drive for $45 after rebate about a year and a half ago. It had been working fine as a backup hard drive on my FreeBSD server. However, it recently failed on me. Directly after a power outage, I was receiving the following message:
FAILURE-READ_DMA status=51
error=40 LBA=135486975 mount = /dev/ad0s1d
Doing fsck -y /dev/ad0s1d, the check would complete without errors. But trying to mount the drive as rw would give me the following error:
mount: /dev/ad0s1d: Input/output error
I was able to mount it read-only to retrieve the data, but I really wanted to have it fixed so I could write to it again.
I tried to follow the FreeBSD handbook guide to reformatting the drive, but that did not complete, giving read/write errors.
It was suggested by cperciva@layeredtech that I
Overwrite that partition with zeroes (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0s1d) and then newfs and mount (newfs /dev/ad0s1d && mount /dev/ad0s1d)
While that series of commands didn’t work (same input/output errors), doing effectively the same thing with the Maxtor diagnostics tool worked.
I went to Maxtor.com, and selected my model # (which seems to only work on IE…), went to Diagnostics, then downloaded PowerMax and put it on a floppy. Running a Basic Quick Test (90 Second) passed, but an Advanced Test (Full Read Scan) failed fairly early on. I was given two error codes, which are supposedly internal for Maxtor, and I guess are used for RMA processing. The codes were dea46771 and dea46761, which mean nothing to me.
So I then performed a Low Level Format (Quick) and Low Level Format (Full). This took the better part of 2 hours. After doing this, the Advanced Test completed. I was then able to format and partition the drive via the FreeBSD Handbook: Adding Disks section.
I have no doubt that the reason the hard drive was failing was the heat inside. I have two 200 GB hard drives and 1 40 GB hard drive all practically laying on top of each other in the hard drive bay. I’m just squeezing as much life as I can out of this old system. Next system, hard drive coolers, video card coolers, {insert third term to match form} coolers, Oh my!
Cliff Said,
November 30, 2005 @ 3:01 pm
Just a heads up about low level formatting fixing stuff.
A low level format basically writes blanks to the entire drive from sector 0, cylinder 0, head 0 to the end of the drive (this includes areas reserverd for partitions MBR data) and will even replace bad blocks with blanks (but don’t expect those sectors to work any better). Something any other format will not touch.
I found this out way back on an old 386 poking arround the bios and wondered what the low level format option did.
Currently it is still only an option in some bios’s but you can obviously get thrid party software to do it for you. I personally it should be a function in all PC BIOS’s as half the time you need it, your drive is so trashed you cant boot your PC to run a low level format program.
I’ve got not idea why I felt the need to get all this drool out, but perhaps you now know ever so slightly more about it.