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HDD can read from, but not write to platters

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First post, by SSTV2

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I'm currently dealing with this issue on Conner CP30200 SCSI HDD.

At first power on, HDD was detected by OS and i could browse and copy files from it (though i didn't try to write anything to it in order to not corrupt deleted files). After some use, it generated lots of bad sectors and caused system to boot slowly. Needless to say, partition table got damaged and HDD could no longer be detected by OS.

I've used "HDD Regenerator" software to scan platters surface and it showed hundreds of bad sectors, and the best part is... not a single bad sector could be fixed with it's help. This software has a function to magnetically regenerate all of the sectors in succession, but nor good, nor bad sectors could be accessed this way. HDD simply cannot write anything to the platters, even inbuilt SCSI controller firmware formatting utility could not perform low level format.

I was able to create an image of this HDD, took a while with all of those bad sectors, but some files could still be restored.

I'm using SCSI cable with a terminator on the end + HDD has it's own signal termination on PCB, SCSI controller is Adaptec AHA-2940UW, HDD controller board is not damaged in any way physically, tested fuses and inspected all traces, everything looks fine, reseated board and firmware ROMs. Tried changing LUN ID numbers from 0 to higher ones, no change in writing data.

It acts as if some sort of write protection kicked in, though there is no such setting via jumpers http://arvutimuuseum.ee/th99/h/txt/567.txt

And it's not the first time i see a desktop HDD that cannot write data to the platters, i also have same issue on 500GB Seagate HDD.

Has anyone dealt with same issue before and knows what causes it? Could it be faulty HDD controller board, read/write head and it's circuitry or something else much simpler, anyone?

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Reply 1 of 2, by Deksor

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This reminds me an old IDE IBM HDD that is only 40MB big. When I got it, it had many many bad sectors. I tried to low-level format it which worked. Then I used FDISK to create partitions and then I tried to format it ... But the problem is that it goes up to 100% and then it says it can't end the formating. So I can't use that drive because whatever I try (I tried windows 2000 to format it to NTFS, linux to format it to ext3, etc) I can't write to it anymore ... except for the low level format.

Now that I think about it, maybe I should look at the tantalum capacitors, they can also go wrong after the years so maybe it creates some latency issues and makes the drive unusable. But I've never tried that for now so I'm just guessing.

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Reply 2 of 2, by SSTV2

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Deksor wrote:

This reminds me an old IDE IBM HDD that is only 40MB big. When I got it, it had many many bad sectors. I tried to low-level format it which worked. Then I used FDISK to create partitions and then I tried to format it ... But the problem is that it goes up to 100% and then it says it can't end the formating. So I can't use that drive because whatever I try (I tried windows 2000 to format it to NTFS, linux to format it to ext3, etc) I can't write to it anymore ... except for the low level format.

Now that I think about it, maybe I should look at the tantalum capacitors, they can also go wrong after the years so maybe it creates some latency issues and makes the drive unusable. But I've never tried that for now so I'm just guessing.

It looks like the very end of your HDD is physically damaged (parking area, closest to spindle) that's why it gets stuck at 100% after trying to format partition, if you can perform a low level format on it, head can still "write" zeroes onto platter surface. Try creating a partition which would use, for example, just 95% of your HDDs surface area, so that damaged zone could never be accessed anymore.

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