Drive (s) wrecked?
I have some drives of various sizes, 1TB, 2TB etc. I am currently working with a 2 TB drive. I place it in a powered external USB-3 drive enclosure. I can see it in lsblk as the correct size (as SDA) , but the disk manager does not see /dev/sda, and fdisk only wants to let me create a 5 GB partition.
If I dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=400K status=progress writes 5 GB and claims my 2 TB drive (In this case) is full.
Is there a way to reclaim this drive? Any information on the drive is unimportant.
Why do you say "drive(s)"? Is this or similar happening with more than one drive?
If the other drives are working fine, then you might already have your answer. If they're not, it sounds like the enclosure.
If you think it's drive, try putting it in the freezer for an hour to see if anything changes. It wouldn't be a permanent fix but, if the problem temporarily goes away, it'll make clear that the problem is the drive, possibly due to add solder joints.
Some drives work fine. Some fail. Some work fine then fail later. But it seems hitting them with gparted to create a single ext4 partition works, brining a 5gb drive back from that state and allowing writes if I write to the partition. If I try to zero the raw device it still fails at 5gb.
Drive(s) because I have a 2tb drive (I am currently working with) and several 1tb drives and many smaller ones.
Have you checked SMART?
Have you tried it with a different enclosure or directly connected to your PC? My last two "faulty" HDDs actually just had a faulty controller in the enclosure. Drives were fine.
This enclosure was working up till when I stopped a dd to try something faster.
Here is a related question - when I was writing random or zeros to the raw device (/dev/sda) I was getting speeds of 1.7 or so mb / s now I am getting 25 mb/s writing to a file in the partition.
Why the difference?
Try in another computer if you have one. The fact dd is limiting you to 5GB though doesn't sound good, not going to lie.
I do not have another available, nor do I have an internal SATA slot available.
Have you tried looking at the disk with gparted?
Created a 2tb partition with gparted now writing to failure with dd. Up to 41gb so far.
Well that is a good sign then. You have definitely broken that 5gb issue. Did you happen to notice if there was. Hidden petition on there?
I did not see any. Gparted would have shown them to me, right?
Kinda depends on the software used to format the drive originally iirc
Sounds like that drive is gone. I’m betting it has dead blocks/sectors
Now the 2TB drive has received 88GB so far - the write continues.
Keep us posted.
The DD continues now at 170Gb of 1024 - a long way to go... 25mb / s
That’s awesome, sounds like hearted may have saved your drive useability.