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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, when I attempt writing data directly to the bad sectors, it should trigger a reallocation, reducing current pending sectors by one and increasing the reallocated sector count.

However, on this disk both Reallocated_Sector_Ct and Reallocated_Event_Count raw values are 0, and dd fails with I/O errors when I attempt to write zeros to the bad sectors. dd works fine, however, when I write to a good sector.

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1 seek=217152
dd: error writing ‘/dev/sdb’: Input/output error

Does this mean that my drive, in some way, has no spare sectors to be used for reallocation? Is my drive just in general a terrible person? (The drive isn't actually mine, I'm helping a friend out. They might have just gotten a cheap drive or something.)

In case it is relevant, here is the output of smartctl -i :

Model Family:     Western Digital Caviar Green (AF)
Device Model:     WDC WD15EARS-00Z5B1
Serial Number:    WD-WMAVU3027748
LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 25998d213
Firmware Version: 80.00A80
User Capacity:    1,500,301,910,016 bytes [1.50 TB]
Sector Size:      512 bytes logical/physical
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ATA8-ACS (minor revision not indicated)
SATA Version is:  SATA 2.6, 3.0 Gb/s
Local Time is:    Fri Oct 18 17:47:29 2013 CDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

UPDATE:
I have run shred on the disk, which has caused Current_Pending_Sector to go to zero. However, Reallocated_Sector_Ct and Reallocated_Event_Count are still zero, and dd is now able to write data to the sectors it was previously unable to. This leads me with several other questions:

  • Why aren't the reallocations being recored by the disk? I'm assuming the reallocation took place as I can now write data directly to the sector and couldn't before.

  • Why did shred cause reallocation and not dd? Does the fact that shred writes random data instead of just zeros make a difference?

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  • How are the other SMART values? Is Uncorrectable Sector Count more than zero?
    – Synetech
    Oct 19, 2013 at 0:26
  • Offline_Uncorrectable, which I'm assuming is the same thing, has a raw value of 25.
    – MetaNova
    Oct 19, 2013 at 0:28
  • Yes it is, and it sounds like the drive is indeed in bad shape. You can check the values against this table, paying special attention to the red rows (health-critical values). The best bet is to copy (not move) everything valuable/irreplaceable to somewhere else, reboot to give it a power cycle, and if it still works, give it a good wipe (preferably with its own dedicated tools, and set it aside as spare storage for unimportant data like downloaded videos.
    – Synetech
    Oct 19, 2013 at 0:38
  • Thanks for your response. My main question would probably have to be why it can't reallocate those sectors. Shouldn't it just detect the sectors are bad, shun them into the void, reallocate, and move on? I'm not worried about any data on the disk as it has long been cleaned off. My friend is not eager to have a 1.5TB paperweight if they can avoid it.
    – MetaNova
    Oct 19, 2013 at 0:45
  • That seems like the thing to expect, but it might be that it has a bad head. If so, then trying to read the drive would work until you try to access the platter that has a bad head, then you’ll get a bunch of read errors because without a head to read, the whole platter is inaccessible. Of course it says sector 45 is bad which might be because it’s already by re-allocated but the SMART wasn’t updated. The warranty expired a few months ago, but you can try emailing them and maybe they’ll do a courtesy replacement.
    – Synetech
    Oct 19, 2013 at 0:53

2 Answers 2

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The WD15EARS drive (and most other recently produced drives) uses Advanced Format, which means that the real physical sector size of this drive is 4 KiB, and the traditional 512-byte sector size is just emulated. Because of this, if a single 4 KiB physical sector goes bad, all 8 corresponding emulated 512-byte sectors become unreadable at once.

(The Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical output from smartctl is not correct, because some WD15EARS drives report wrong physical sector size — apparently your drive has a firmware version which is broken in that respect.)

Moreover, when a single emulated 512-byte sector is written, the Advanced Format drive actually needs to read the whole 4 KiB physical sector, change the corresponding 512-byte part of it, then write the whole physical sector to the media. If the media is good, this read-modify-write operation just causes a significant slowdown compared to a drive with real 512-byte physical sectors. However, if the 4 KiB physical sector is bad and cannot be read, any write operation which does not rewrite the sector completely will fail. Because of this, you cannot force sector reallocation on such drives using dd with bs=512 count=1 — you must use at least bs=512 count=8 and make sure that the sector number in the seek= option is a multiple of 8. (This assumes that the “Windows XP Compatible” jumper is not installed, otherwise the alignment offset added by this jumper must also be taken into account.)

Another reason why forcing the reallocation with dd might fail is that by default Linux uses a cache in the block layer to access block devices, and this may cause read-modify-write operations in software, which would also fail when an unreadable sector is encountered. You can add the oflag=direct option to bypass this cache for the device specified by of=... (there is also the iflag=direct option, which applies to the input device).

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  • Thank you, thank you, thank you, this was so helpful. I read the label on the drive and it says "advance format". I know what that means now... Do you have any idea, though, about the drive not reporting any reallocated sectors?
    – MetaNova
    Oct 19, 2013 at 20:05
  • 1
    "current pending sectors" are not necessarily bad sectors, the disk just had a little bit of trouble reading it before in its idle checks, possibly due to not having written there in a long time and the data starting to fade (ie magnetic field weakening). Writing new data to that sector refreshes the data in that sector with new data that is strongly formed on the disk. Thus if you write to a pending sector the disk assumes it is ok now. You should try reading the data back from those sectors to confirm they are stable.
    – BeowulfNode42
    Dec 23, 2013 at 1:03
  • for those people who don't care about any data on the disk and don't want to find the exact list of sectors or do the sector count math just dd the entire disk with a block size of a multiple of 4KiB, like 16MiB. Then use a block size of 4KiB for the last part of the disk that is smaller than the previously chosen block size.
    – BeowulfNode42
    Dec 23, 2013 at 1:10
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I had to do this recently and found that running shred on the whole disk worked very well. While shred is useless for its intended purpose except on diskettes, it does just what is required to get the self-healing going on bad blocks.

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