Samsung Hard Disk Failure

Hi folks,
I've just had a pretty bad day. I've lost one harddrive completely, taking a 1TB array with it, and my backup drive has just started clicking. The first drive is a lost cause, as is the data, but the second is what I'm here to post about.

My Samsung HD501LJ started making horrible clicking noises eariler, at which point I synced and booted the power straight away. On reboot I unmounted the drive and ran a badblocks on it, to find it hit the clicks again around 1/4 of the way into the drive and pretty much froze badblocks.

So I rebooted into the samsung diagnostic tools and ran a full length surface scan (which took about 4 hours) to find that the following errors (again approx 25% into the disk) occurred:

C50300 H5 S132 Ecc error
....more ecc errors
C50411 H5 S620 Media Error
C50489 H5 S481 Media Error
....more media errors with ecc mixed in for good measure
C50600 H5 S602 Media Error
....more ecc errors
C50712 H5 S1017 Ecc error

These were the only errors found on the disk, and it was in one big contiguous section.

So from that I read around 400 cylinders worth of screwed hard disk, all on head 5 with various different sectors. I've not abused it or anything, other than simply doing a lot of read/writes recently (due to attempting to recover the array that died).

From the symptoms and the tests I've done, I consider it is likely that:
a) the heads crashed, thus mangling the surface
b) a power spike caused misalignment overwriting some of the alignment track

In the case of (a) there is not a lot I can do. However, the case of (b) got me wondering - are there tools which can rewrite the alignment tracks of the disk? I know Samsung's tools allow a zero-fill format, but does that also do things such as the alignment tracks?

In either case I need to copy off as much data as possible - the main issue is that as soon as the hard drive starts to attempt to read from the bad sectors, it clicks and anything accessing it seems to pretty much stop. If anyone can think of a clever way of allowing me to bypass this issue (I run linux mainly, but can dual boot into WinXP), that would be excellent.

Also in either case if the Samsung tools allow finding of bad sectors and then making the disk avoid them in future (i.e. telling the hardware to not use those sectors) that would be useful - does anyone know if they can do that (or other tools capable of that)?

Finally, the disk is less than a year old, so it might have to just go back under its warranty - but this is the final option for me really, it is a lot of hassle returning it and waiting for a new one.

All help, advice, comments etc is very welcome - however small :)

You could give SpinRite a go, I believe it does what you're after, there is also HDD Regenerator which is similar as I undnerstand it.

You need to RMA the drive of course and Samsung RMA isn't a bother. You'll get a new drive back 2-3 days after posting.

Depending on how much the data is worth, a specialist recovery company might be able to get some stuff back - off both drives. (But it won't be cheap) What level was the RAID?

The data from the dead drive was not important enough to get recovered - and since then I've blitzed the array's file system in the attempt to recover as much as I can anyway. It was running JBOD (i.e. fake raid), which was a pretty dumb idea in the first place - won't be doing that again!

Thanks for the tips on software - will give both a looking over. As Samsung RMA isn't such a bother, it is probably worth me doing that once I've retrieved all I can from the drive. I will phone Scan today and work out the ins and outs :)

Don't bother with Scan, just go directly here Samsung Warranty Service - Rexo .

exact same problem with my samsung hard disk.
although i think its a different model, its in a metal case so i carnt tell.

i hear this click every time it boots up and it goes to a stop error, this is not the first problem i have had with it but i only bought the hard drive around 2 months ago so it should be working fine.

if you managed to fix this please tell me how or give me some advice to starting it.

Unless you are desperate to recover data from it, it sounds like its time to return it under warranty. I found the Rexo return service (posted earlier) was incredibly quick and efficient. For this alone I will be sticking with Samsung drives in future.

Oh, and just to clear something up - as most people know, hard drives become more likely to fail with age, usually after five years or so. But hard disks also are very likely to fail within the first few weeks of running as well - so that might go to explain why yours has failed.

thanks,

i found if i hit it enough then it let me load windows back on.
before the hard drive just was failing completly.
just have to cope with lost data...