Bad blocks not getting remapped on Maxtor drive

From: John Hendrikx (hjohn_at_remove.this.xs4all.nl)
Date: 03/28/04 

Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2004 12:44:15 +0200

Hiya all,

I've been trying to fix a problem with bad blocks on a fairly new Maxtor
300 GB drive (only about 6 months old and not used that much).
/sbin/badblocks will report about 100 bad blocks in a single range, and
keeps reporting them even when I use the -n or -w options to write to
those blocks -- I was under the impression a disk will remap bad blocks
when written to:

# /sbin/badblocks -w -c 16384 /dev/hdg2 13120000 13110000

-> Results in about 100 bad blocks to be printed (takes about 3 minutes
orso... about 1 in 20 times I try this, the drive will make the
parking sound *clunk*).

I've also tried zeroing that area with dd, like this:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdg bs=512 seek=346379385 count=20000
dd: writing '/dev/hdg': Input/output error
11152+0 records in
11151+0 records out

I did the above atleast 20 times with both programs, results have been the
same. The output from /sbin/badblocks varies slightly though, sometimes
printing the blocks in a different order or omitting a few at the start/end
of the range. Each time it reported around 100 bad blocks though.

I also tried using the -D option of hdparm to activate defect management,
however this option only resulted in an error for the Maxtor drive (I'm
assuming the drive doesn't offer an option to change this and defaults
to on).

All of this seems to point out that the drive has run out of spare
blocks which it can use to remap. However, smartctl reports it only has
2 sectors reallocated. After several hours of writing to that area and
trying all sorts of things, I managed to get it to 3 sectors
reallocated, but it hasn't changed since then.

Here's part of the smartctl -a output:

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
   3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 252 252 063 Pre-fail Always - 3738
   4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 253 253 000 Old_age Always - 19
   5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 253 253 063 Pre-fail Always - 3
   6 Read_Channel_Margin 0x0001 253 253 100 Pre-fail Offline - 0
   7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000a 253 252 000 Old_age Always - 0
   8 Seek_Time_Performance 0x0027 253 250 187 Pre-fail Always - 38341
   9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 238 238 000 Old_age Always - 56477
  10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x002b 252 252 157 Pre-fail Always - 0
  11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x002b 253 252 223 Pre-fail Always - 0
  12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 253 253 000 Old_age Always - 16
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 253 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 253 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0032 253 253 000 Old_age Always - 43
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x000a 253 252 000 Old_age Always - 26535
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0008 253 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0008 253 253 000 Old_age Offline - 3
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0008 252 252 000 Old_age Offline - 1
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0008 199 199 000 Old_age Offline - 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x000a 253 252 000 Old_age Always - 0
201 Soft_Read_Error_Rate 0x000a 253 252 000 Old_age Always - 17
202 TA_Increase_Count 0x000a 253 252 000 Old_age Always - 0
203 Run_Out_Cancel 0x000b 253 252 180 Pre-fail Always - 192
204 Shock_Count_Write_Opern 0x000a 253 252 000 Old_age Always - 0
205 Shock_Rate_Write_Opern 0x000a 253 252 000 Old_age Always - 0
207 Spin_High_Current 0x002a 252 252 000 Old_age Always - 0
208 Spin_Buzz 0x002a 252 252 000 Old_age Always - 0
209 Offline_Seek_Performnce 0x0024 192 192 000 Old_age Offline - 0
  99 Unknown_Attribute 0x0004 253 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0
100 Unknown_Attribute 0x0004 253 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0
101 Unknown_Attribute 0x0004 253 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0

<cut ATA error log>

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Short offline Completed: read failure 60% 4967 0x14a5800c
# 2 Extended captive Completed: read failure 20% 4963 0x14a5800c

Note 1:
Everytime I try to write to the defect area, the numbers Run_Out_Cancel
and Hardware_ECC_Recovered go up, as well as the amount of ATA errors in
the log. The Current_Pending_Sector value changed from 2 to 3 at the same
time when Reallocated_Sector_Ct changed to 3.

Note 2:
Run_Out_Cancel might be the incorrect name for Maxtor drives.

As far as I can see, the drive is still perfectly fine, it just won't remap
the defective blocks. I've considered remapping the blocks in software (with
mke2fs -c) but since this drive is going to be part of a raid-array I would
like to be able to rely on the drive to remap blocks on its own.

Any help would be appreciated!

--John

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