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Dealing with the damaged drive warning


Nerva

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Probably six months ago I got a notice from Scanner that one of my pooled (using DrivePool) 4TB drives was damaged (less than 2MB worth).   I moved all the files off of it, deleted the partition (leaving the drive completely empty), and created a new partition with a full (not "quick") format.   Scanner says the damage is still there, but (no surprise) there are no files allocated in the damaged area.   However, Scanner loves to keep reminding me the drive is damaged, even though the damage has not increased, and I ran a Burst Test on the drive for an entire day, which it passed.

 

My pool is 99% full without that "damaged" 4TB drive being included and that prevents me backing up the computers in the house, so I would like to add it back to the pool, since the damage area isn't in use.   What is frustrating is that DrivePool won't put any files on it, because it is "damaged", even though the damage is old and quarantined.   The "damaged" drive had yet to fail in six months, but one of my older 1TB drives has since failed and I lost some non-essential data because there was no room to duplicate it.   I finally gave up and disabled the option to remove duplicated files from damaged drives, so that it would use the drive at least for duplication.

 

I recently discovered that the 4TB drive had a bad SATA cable, so I am wondering if perhaps the "damage" isn't even real.   However, I don't see an option in Scanner to manually re-check damaged sectors -- all I see is an option for how often it should automatically retest them.

 

Anyways, I'm wondering if there's any way to recheck the drive, or somehow clear the "damaged" flag for old damage?

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A bad cable could definitely cause the damaged sectors. A burst test may reveal this (but it may take a while, which is why we recommend running it for 24 hours).

 

As for resetting the statis, double click on the drive in question. This should show the sector map, and there should be a column of 4 buttons on the left side. Click on the furth button down (the one with the green circle). Select the "mark all unreadable sectors as unchecked".

This should cause StableBit Scanner to rescan the affected sectors. 

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I'm experiencing something similar, although I have not reformatted the drive yet.

My drive has 136 unreadable sectors resulting in 68kb of unreadable space on the disk.

I went through the file search procedure and found that only 1 file was affected.

I deleted said file and wrote a new version of the file to the HDD.

I reset the block and let it rescan finding the same unreadable amount of space, but no files affected.

 

How would I go about fixing the status on this drive?

Is a reformat necessary?

Does reformatting mark this block so that it doesn't get written to again and thus will pass the HDD scan?

Would doing so mark this drive as healthy assuming I set the current S.M.A.R.T data to ignore the current unreadable sectors?

 

Here is a picture of the affected block

http://imgur.com/sH7jShO

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I'm experiencing something similar, although I have not reformatted the drive yet.

 

You can have unreadable sectors in the free space in the drive.  That is normal, and ... well, really, preferred, as it means that no files are affected by it (yet). 

 

If the affected sectors are repairable, then you need to force the disk to write to them.  StableBit Scanner doesn't include this functionality right now, because writing to these sectors will prevent you from being able to properly recover data from them, and data integrity and retrieval is more important. 

 

Re-writing the file doesn't mean that it will end up in the same section on the disk. And in fact, usually, it won't. 

 

A full format is a quick and simple way to address this, as it writes zeroes to all the sectors in the partition (for most cases, to the entire disk). Writing to the affected sector may cause the disk to trigger the internal corrective routines to fix the sector or remap it. 

 

However, this doesn't always happen, especially on older disks, as there may not be enough free space to remap it, or the damage may be spreading. 

 

 

Additionally, running a "CHKDSK /b" pass on the disk in question does a thorough check, and may also fix the issue for you. But this is much less likely.  A full format is (unfortunately) more likely to resolve this issue for you. 

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Can I jump into this question? I have two damaged drives. Both with minimal data loss (less than 1 MB on 3TB drives). I recovered the files from these drives and recopied them to the pool. How do I get the damaged warning to turn off (so I can use the not damaged part of the drive) and have the drive ignore the damaged sectors? Preferably, without having to reformat the entire disk.

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Can I jump into this question? I have two damaged drives. Both with minimal data loss (less than 1 MB on 3TB drives). I recovered the files from these drives and recopied them to the pool. How do I get the damaged warning to turn off (so I can use the not damaged part of the drive) and have the drive ignore the damaged sectors? Preferably, without having to reformat the entire disk.

 

You can mark the drives as unchecked or as "good" in the UI.  This clears the status, at least until the next scan. 

http://stablebit.com/Support/Scanner/2.X/Manual?Section=Disk%20Scanning%20Panel

 

You can also disable the surface scan from occurring on the drive (by right clicking on it in StableBit Scanner and selecting "Disk Settings". 

http://stablebit.com/Support/Scanner/2.X/Manual?Section=Disk%20Settings

 

Additionally, you can tweak the StableBit Scanner balancer in StableBit DrivePool. Click on Pool Options -> Balancing -> Balancers tab -> StableBit Scanner. 

Uncheck the options... though, I'd recommend leaving the "unduplicated data" option, so it moves out unique data that would be lost if the drive fails. 

 

 

 

However, if you still have the damaged sectors, and they come back if you rescan, I would recommend attempting to fixing the issues, or replacing the disk (if it's under warranty, RMA it, so you can get a new disk). 

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One more question. One of the drives is going bad. I checked the files. They are all duplicated files. What should I do now?

 

 

If the drive is going bad, and all the files are duplicated, then remove the disk using the StableBit DrivePool UI. There is a "Duplicated Data later" option. This skips duplicated data, and only moves out "unique", unduplicated data.  It then runs a duplication pass to reduplicate this data once the disk is removed. 

 

I'd also recommend the "Forced damaged disk removal" as it will skip problem files rather than erroring out on them. 

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