Score:0

Unable to format HDD

cn flag

A friend of mine gave me his external 2TB Seagate HDD which appeared to be somewhat faulty. And, it is indeed pretty faulty.

First, I did try a lot of "common" commands, spent a few hours googling stuff, tried Linux and Windows (for chkdsk), opened the HDD case to plug it directly in SATA and I'll add that I do not need to recover the data, I just need to format it.

lsblk

NAME         MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda            8:0    0   1,8T  0 disk 

Here, sda is the disk, its size, 1,8T seems correct.

In GParted, the disk only appears to be ~1.9GB. I can create a partition table but I cannot create a valid partition. And even if I could, it could only be 1.9GB.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

dd: error writing '/dev/sda': No space left on device
3782129+0 records in
3782128+0 records out
1936449536 bytes (1,9 GB, 1,8 GiB) copied, 7,04022 s, 275 MB/s

smartctl -a /dev/sda

Read Device Identity failed: Invalid argument

parted -l

Error: Unable to open /dev/sda - unrecognised disk label.   
Model:  (file)                                                           
Disk /dev/sda : 1936MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition table : unknown

dmesg

[ 7925.612174] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Synchronizing SCSI cache
[ 7925.862625] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Synchronize Cache(10) failed: Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
[ 7931.193045] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] 3809353968 512-byte logical blocks: (1.95 TB/1.77 TiB)
[ 7931.193049] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] 4096-byte physical blocks
[ 7931.193313] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[ 7931.193316] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 2f 00 00 00
[ 7931.193593] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 7931.193995] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Optimal transfer size 33553920 bytes not a multiple of physical block size (4096 bytes)
[ 7931.390515] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#18 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
[ 7931.390523] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#18 Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] 
[ 7931.390529] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#18 Add. Sense: Invalid command operation code
[ 7931.390536] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#18 CDB: Read(6) 08 00 00 00 08 00
[ 7931.390545] blk_update_request: critical target error, dev sda, sector 0 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x0 phys_seg 1 prio class 0
[ 7931.390558] Buffer I/O error on dev sda, logical block 0, async page read
[ 7931.500384] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#19 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
[ 7931.500451] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#19 Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] 
[ 7931.500461] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#19 Add. Sense: Invalid command operation code
[ 7931.500472] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#19 CDB: Read(6) 08 00 00 00 08 00

Do you have any idea? I guess the HDD may be dead, but I'm not quite sure.
What I find intriguing is the 1.8TB size with lsblk and 1.9GB elsewhere.
And again, I do not need to recover previous data (and since I did write a lot of 0's, they're probably gone for good :p). I just want to format the disk to make it usable again.

Thanks for your time :)

in flag
Was this hard drive sitting next to some unshielded speakers? Sounds like the blocks are completely messed up and the platters disagree with the firmware. Even if you could create a 1.8TB partition, it would never be trustworthy enough to invest the time on. Send it to the recyclers
FedKad avatar
cn flag
Did you try to read SMART data from disk? See this for example: https://askubuntu.com/questions/528072/how-can-i-check-the-smart-status-of-a-ssd-or-hdd-on-current-versions-of-ubuntu-1
Pablo avatar
cn flag
@matigo No idea, but yeah it does look like he's ready to leave this earth :(
Pablo avatar
cn flag
@FedonKadifeli SMART data aren't accessible, see my output for smartctl.
cn flag
This seems to fix the DID_ERROR: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/525290/usb-hdd-not-found
paladin avatar
kr flag
Make sure this drive is not in read-only mode, aka harddisk bios password, or something else.
Pablo avatar
cn flag
@paladin sadly it's not, as you can see in dmesg output `[ 7931.193313] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off`
paladin avatar
kr flag
Try to disable the disk cache of this harddisk. Has this drive hardware encryption? If so, try to disable hardware encryption.
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