Relocated HDD sectors
-
I'm intending to make a program that erase an HDD. I know that modern HDDs relocate potentially deffective sectors by SMART testing, and replace with other not normally accessible. Is there a way to access ALL the sectors?
VII. 36. When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard. SUN-TZU - Art of War
-
I'm intending to make a program that erase an HDD. I know that modern HDDs relocate potentially deffective sectors by SMART testing, and replace with other not normally accessible. Is there a way to access ALL the sectors?
VII. 36. When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard. SUN-TZU - Art of War
Relocation (remapping) is done transparently by the disk firmware. When a sector is detected as bad, all it's data are transferred to a special reserve area called sparse area and all further read/write attempts are redirected to it. See this wikipedia article.[^] Sparse areas are not accessible using any standard disk access methods as all LBA addressing to it automatically redirected. (But, it is possible that there may be some vendor-specific commands to do that) *TIP: You can use ATA Secure Erase[^] command to perform a firmware level erase of disk sectors. The GNU Shred utility is a noteworthy program using this command.
Beauty cannot be defined by abscissas and ordinates; neither are circles and ellipses created by their geometrical formulas.
-
Relocation (remapping) is done transparently by the disk firmware. When a sector is detected as bad, all it's data are transferred to a special reserve area called sparse area and all further read/write attempts are redirected to it. See this wikipedia article.[^] Sparse areas are not accessible using any standard disk access methods as all LBA addressing to it automatically redirected. (But, it is possible that there may be some vendor-specific commands to do that) *TIP: You can use ATA Secure Erase[^] command to perform a firmware level erase of disk sectors. The GNU Shred utility is a noteworthy program using this command.
Beauty cannot be defined by abscissas and ordinates; neither are circles and ellipses created by their geometrical formulas.