Questions tagged [sectors]
The sectors tag has no usage guidance.
86
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GPT PMBR Size Mismatch will be corrected by w(rite)
Linux gives error "GPT PMBR size mismatch will be corrected by w(rite)."
The error message is far from self-explanatory. Does this mean that Linux will (attempt to) resize the GPT partition ...
15
votes
1
answer
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Can prematurely powering down a computer cause bad sectors in a hard drive?
Q1: Can forcibly powering off a PC without using the built-in shutdown/reboot functions, cause a HDD to accumulate bad sectors? Whether it be the result of BSODs, lockups, crashes, etc.
Q2: If so, ...
13
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2
answers
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What does the output of fdisk mean?
I've got a flash drive and I want to understand the properties of it as is outputted from fdisk. I inserted it and check the dmesg and I could see that it was mounted as /dev/sdb1 so I ran fdisk to ...
12
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1
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Western Digital Green drive from 512 byte sectors (jumpered) to 4k byte sectors (removal of jumper)
I was using a WD20EARS drive with pins 7 and 8 jumpered in order to use it on an OS that doesn't support 4k sectors. But now, I want to transfer that hard drive over to an OS that has 4k sector ...
12
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1
answer
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What is the difference between a disk block and a sector?
I know that a sector is the unit in which a track is splitted, but I had this doubt since I was looking for information about the maximum number of pointers that an inode can support. I found that ...
11
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1
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What are the differences between Host Protected Area (HPA), Device Configuration Overlay (DCO), and service area of a HDD/SSD?
I'm confused about the differences between the Host Protected Area (HPA), Device Configuration Overlay (DCO), and the service area of a HDD or SSD. From what I gather on the wiki pages, disks can have ...
10
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2
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Unable to Write Zeros to Bad Sectors/Hard Disk Not Counting Reallocated Sectors
I have a drive that is reporting that the current pending sectors is "45". I have used badblocks to identify the sectors and I have been trying to write zeros to them with dd.
From what I understand, ...
10
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1
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Is it possible to create a software RAID 1 with different sector sizes?
I bought a hard drive of a different model to my main drive and tried to mirrored them, but the following error message came up in Windows 7 Virtual Disk Manager:
All disks holding extends for a ...
8
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4
answers
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How to convert the Western Digital "Ultrastar® DC HC530 14TB HDD" from 512e to 4Kn sector size? (In Windows 10)
Background
The Western Digital "Ultrastar® DC HC530 14TB HDD" (Model number: WUH721414ALE6L4)(SATA Interface) comes only in a 512e sector size by default.
According to the 2 Western Digital ...
8
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2
answers
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NTFS; marking sectors bad using Linux
I have a massive ZFS array on my fileserver. Whenever a disk reports bad sectors to smartmon, I order a replacement, and I shelve the failing one.
And by "shelving the failing one", I mean that I ...
7
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3
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How can I check the cluster size (allocation unit size) of an exFat partition on Windows?
I want to reformat an exFAT USB drive with the same allocation size as the current factory exFAT partition, so when it ask me for allocation size, I don't know what to answer:
Thus the question: How ...
7
votes
1
answer
4k
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Number of sectors per track in hard drive?
Is the number of sectors fixed for each track in a hard drive? I am wondering about this because most hard drive specifications give an accurate value for sectors/track rate. I am confused because I ...
6
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4
answers
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hard drive pending sector count
For some reason, my pending sector count to be remapped is unbelievably high (2163 currently). I've seen it go up 20 in one week. But no sectors have been remapped. Dell's computer diagnostics utility ...
6
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3
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What are disk sectors for?
I started to get confused on how the hard disk operates, particularly in writing and reading data into its platters.
According to this article:
http://www.tech-faq.com/how-data-is-stored-in-your-...
6
votes
1
answer
503
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Migrate Win7 upgrade from 63 sector to 4096 sector advanced format disk
If I use the Windows 7 backup on a system that has the 63 sector starting location and restore it to an advanced format 4096 sector system, will the restore create the starting sector at 63 or 4096?
5
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3
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Does NTFS (or any file system) support files outside of the partition?
So on my C: drive, there was a file called BOOTSECT.BAK. Not knowing what it is, I opened it up in HxD and the first 14 bytes were B \0 O \0 O \0 T \0 M \0 G \0 R \0 corresponding to the UTF-16LE ...
5
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2
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4k Sectors: Which Drives Don't Lie About Having 512b Sectors and Correctly Report 4k Sectors?
I recently returned a Western Digital WD20EARS drive with 4k sectors (Western Digital refers to this as "advanced format"), because I found out that it lies and reports 512b sectors to the OS, and ...
4
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2
answers
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When referring to filesystems and disks, are "disk sectors", "disk blocks", "chunk size", and "disk records" the same thing?
I'm pretty sure that a sector is basically a block, but I was moreso confused about chunk sizes and especially records. Some system calls require that your area in memory that buffers data from disk ...
4
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0
answers
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Bad sectors in RAM, fixed or not?
So I have blocked some bad memory range from RAM memory.
My Question is the next one, I have done it right?
Here you have the info:
C:\Windows\system32>bcdedit /set badmemorylist 0xFC 0xFD 0xFE ...
3
votes
6
answers
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Is it possible that an SD card has 100% bad sectors?
I have an SD card that has been used in a photo camera for some months, and it's been working perfectly fine until today. It failed when we were just browsing pictures in the camera screen (so it wasn'...
3
votes
3
answers
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Is it possible to detect the previous byte position on a hard drive after it has been overwritten?
I keep hearing about these statements that "a hard drive is like a cassette tape because it is a magnetic medium". That got me thinking...
Back in the day when I used to play DJ as a young lad, I ...
3
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1
answer
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How to read MFT on USB Hard Drive (NTFS, 1TB)?
I'm looking for a high-level method to read the MFT entries on an NTFS file system for a Seagate 1TB internal hard drive. The platform is Windows 7.
I need to fetch the filename, block size and ...
3
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1
answer
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Is the first sector of the hard drive in the center or along the edge of the drive?
On a hard drive, where is the physical location of the first sector. Is it towards the center along the axis of rotation or along the outer edge? Does this vary from manufacturer to manufacture.
3
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1
answer
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Determine sector-size of a drive
I know usually the sector size is 512 B but some drives use 4 KiB (advanced format).
How can I check which one is used by a drive? Is the sector size somewhere stored on the drive - e.g. in the MBR ...
3
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2
answers
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File slack / RAM slack: why does Windows write arbitrary RAM bytes to disk? Does Linux too?
I just read about file slack in a book about Windows 7. What I already (think to) know:
Windows stores data on the disk in clusters. A cluster usually contains 8 sectors of 512 bytes each, so 4096 ...
3
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1
answer
3k
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Linux command to get FAT32 sectors of a file
I'd like to find an equivalent command to debugfs but for FAT32 partitions within
Linux.
I need to list all the sectors corresponding to a specific file (I'm working
on a disk imaged with dd).
If ...
3
votes
1
answer
2k
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System randomly freezes yet mouse still moves, SSD out of reallocatable sectors, should I replace it? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Is it really possible to repair bad sectors?
This problem has lasted for the past 48 hours. The first time it happened, a program I was running stopped responding, so I tried ...
2
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4
answers
321
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Fixboot won't stay fixed
On a Windows XP Home system that wouldn't boot and gave an error that said "Error loading operating system", I ran fixboot from the XP install disk. It seemed to successfully fix the boot sector after ...
2
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1
answer
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What is a valid block size in a disk?
Let be a disk with the following characteristics :
bytes per sector = 512
sectors per track = 50
tracks per surface = 2000
number of platters = 5
average rotational speed =5400 rpm
average seek time =...
2
votes
2
answers
5k
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Reallocated bad sectors cause my HDD to slow down?
I've just used several utilities to check whether my HDD drive is really failing - I've come to a conclusion that it's the hard disk drive that causes unusual slow downs as my system almost freezes ...
2
votes
1
answer
4k
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Why is my physical sector size is different than the logical sector size? [duplicate]
I used fsutil in windows to find out the sector info about my volumes. I have two hard disk one is SSD while the other one is typical magnetic tape hard disk.
The SSD drive volume C have both logical ...
2
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5
answers
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Is it possible for the filesystem's logical block size to be less than the physical sector size?
Let's say we have a block device (eg. Hard Drive) with 4096 bytes sector size and no 512 bytes emulation is available (The hard drive only understands units of 4096 bytes size).
Is is possible to ...
2
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1
answer
586
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File size on disk gets minimum equal to memory page size instead of disk sector size?
I often write small programs of sizes < 512 bytes, which is my disk's sector size. However, the du command always shows these files' disk usage at 4K. My memory page size is 4K.
So I was ...
2
votes
1
answer
739
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Determine which sectors of a hard disk a given file occupies?
Is there a way I can see which sectors of the hard disk a given file occupies?
The filesystem is ext3 or ext4 on Linux.
2
votes
1
answer
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Reading a file using LBA addressing
Is it possible to read/execute files/programs using the LBA addressing rather than the file system location?
For example can I execute /bin/sh using the LBA sector locations of it obtained using ...
2
votes
1
answer
2k
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Clone a 2TB WD Green internal drive with bad sectors to a 3TB partitioned external
I have a 2TB WD Black drive and would like to simply do a straight clone from a failing 3TB drive to it. Both are SATA. Will I be able to just install the new drive alongside the faulty one and then ...
2
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0
answers
711
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Getting a 4TB USB drive (4k native sector size) to work with Xen and Windows 2008 guest
I am trying to get a new 4TB Seagate USB drive to work with Xen 6.2 and a Windows 2008 R2 virtual guest.
The Xen host sees the drive fine, fdisk -l lists it with the correct capacity, etc. I can ...
2
votes
1
answer
468
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Could there be data loss on hard drive due to reallocated sectors?
The SMART data for one of my hard drives indicates that it has some reallocated sectors. I've read that a bad sector will only be reallocated on a write operation (meaning the original data is being ...
2
votes
2
answers
567
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Realocated Sector Count showing weird number
As can be seen on the screenshot below one of my hard drives is showing a weird count for sectors. Should I be worried about the disk dying? It's been running like this for four years. Could this be ...
1
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1
answer
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What's the difference between sector interleave and sector skew, and are both ever used on the same disk?
In reading about the geometries and layouts of different disks and filesystems in various OSes, or at least floppies from the late '70s through the mid '90s where I was focusing, I noticed the terms &...
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2
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How to get a file's sector location/number?
I want to know the sector location of a particular file on my hard drive.
Can I get that by any means?
I am running Mac OS X (Intel) with a Hitachi HDD.
1
vote
1
answer
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What is the difference between allocation unit size and sector size?
I have been given the following disk recommendation:
The disk drives should have standard native sector sizes of 512
bytes and 4 KB. Hard disks with sector sizes larger than 4 KB may
cause errors ...
1
vote
3
answers
315
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Is it possible to remove sectors from a disk?
My question is a simple one, I think, but I could not find an answer on the internet (2h search time...): I want to remove to concept of sectors from one of my hdds?
If you think, this question is ...
1
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3
answers
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Why the different arc length sector have the same size data capacity?
The sector-A and sector-B, the arc length are different, but they representing data capacity are same, such as 512KB.
you see, whether the different cylinder sector's density is different?
and if we ...
1
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1
answer
486
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Mismatch between CxHxS and "total number of sectors"
Model: ATA ST320LT007-9ZV14 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 38913,80,62
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
BIOS cylinder,head,sector geometry: 38913,255,63. Each cylinder is 8225kB.
Partition Table: ...
1
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1
answer
70
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Request to allow restoration of HDD sectors image
I took apart my Creative Nomad Zen Xtra and opened the HDD up in HXD.exe then saved all the sectors to my d: drive so I could use the HDD for something else temporarily but then I realized I need ...
1
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1
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507
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Is it possible to EDIT/REMOVE the first sectors of a SDD/HDD?
Read This for the full story:
BitLocker Recovery Key Isn't working ( Corrupted Maybe ? )
the drive isn't encrypted yet
I mentioned that in my older post, and it appears to be correct the drive isn't ...
1
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2
answers
615
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What is the "write page" size of a WDS200T2B0A/WDS200T2B0B?
Does anyone know the write page¹ size of a Western Digital Blue SATA SSD (model numbers WDS200T2B0A or WDS200T2B0B)?
I contacted WD support and they're claiming it is 512B, but most information I've ...
1
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0
answers
330
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How to spot or match the specific sector of the DVD disc in the movie?
I've been checking the condition of DVD discs with VSO Inspector.
Most of time, it doesn't show any errors on the discs. However, when there's an error on a disc, sometimes it shows that there's an ...
1
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0
answers
151
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Do new USB flash drives use advanced format (AF)?
I just want to know if that new feature (AF - advanced format) on some hard drives, is present on flash (USB external disk) drives as well. I'm a little bit confused because a simple check on /dev/...