For those who have 'BRICKED' their HDDs: there's still hope!

[HawleyTronics]

I have read far and wide how a lot of folks who, during the process of trying to get OS X installed, have 'bricked' their hard drives. (Pretty much made them useless and could no longer boot or format them.)

 

I had the same experience during the process of trying to install 10.4.6 HotISO...it crapped out and after booting up my System Commander CD, it pretty much told me that I 'bricked' mine as well. But being in the IT field, I know that you typically cannot destroy a hard drive by loading an OS on it...there are always ways to get back to square one.

 

I almost forgot that I had a Maxtor MaxBlast3 partioner CD handy and that it had a utility to Zero-out your hard drive. I booted up with that CD and zeroed-out my drive and was then able to get back into it and partition it again.

 

You can download MaxBlast4 from HERE

 

So don't give up on your 'bricked' hard drives, there's always light at the end of the tunnel!

Edited March 9, 2007 by HawleyTronics

[Dense]

I don't normally reply to this type of posts but this is total rubbish. I understand this posters good intentions but what has been posted just doesn't happen. He might be confusing a corrupted MBR or destroyed partition table but these can all be dealt with using standard utilities. "Bricking" is a term more often used in the Sony PSP scene in regards to firmware problems.

[hecker]

Also, low-level zero-ing out of HDD's (popular in the mid-90's) is completely unnecessary with modern drives and even risky if done with the wrong tools.

 

Normally repartitioning the whole drive is enough to get them back working.

 

hecker

[sidding]

I wanna scream one of savatage's song - "not what you see" when i read this post. there's this stanza in the song:

 

I don't understand

I don't understand

I don't understand

I don't understand

I don't understand

 

If you still don't get it, i can't make out what the thread's author is saying, not one bit.

 

How can you not format a hard disk? or a partition?

 

Erase all the mbr and your data's gone.

 

Of course the real data is there but nobody knows exactly what those 0s and 1s are trying to say.

 

I'm only familiar with the traditional 512 bytes mbr. Newer and other type of these baffe me.

[NeSuKuN]

[offtopic]I LOVE that song >.<[/offtopic]

[hecker]

I wanna scream one of savatage's song - "not what you see" when i read this post. there's this stanza in the song:

 

I don't understand

I don't understand

 

The original poster just pointed out the "zero-out" method for recovering faulty HDD's when partitioning or formatting doesn't help.

This usually means either:

1.- Zero-Outing the HDD by simply writing 0's on it's entire structure. (There are different levels of intensity here)

2.- Zero-Out "reactivating" or "refreshing" the HDD's structure. This involved writing 0's and 1's in several stages.

3.- Zero-Out is also what some applications call doing a "Low Level Format" or "physical formatting" (quoted from wikipedia):

It is the division of hard disk platters into tracks, sectors, and cylinders. Tracks, sectors, and cylinders define the divisions in which a hard disk accesses a data from a hard disk platter. This was considered to be a dangerous task to be performed on older discs for possible surface damage.

 

A low level format should never be done on modern drives, as the layout is predetermined at the factory and attempting to change it could destroy the drive.

 

These methods are all called "zero-out" by many applications and users. Many older drives included applications to zero-out discs using a general procedure. Modern drives, however, are initialized when constructed and do not require any sort of low level manipulation.

 

hecker

Edited March 9, 2007 by hecker

[sidding]

Hmm, chance to learn something new...

 

So where does these information about tracks, sectors and cylinders go? I take it that the hard disk must be serverely damaged so that you have to use low level format. I've never experienced this before so I don't know much.

 

So (I think) when partitioning you use information about tracks, sectors and cylinders but somehow this infomartion is damaged or missing. When you low-level format, you overwrite the old faulty one so that you can partition again.

 

Is this it or I'm just pulling this out of thin air?

[hecker]

A short info sheet on FORMATTING:

 

Formatting (Hard Drives) Def.: The process by which a medium (hard disc) is made ready to hold data.

 

There are two distinct categories:

* Low-Level-Format: the physical division of a hard disk in Tracks, sectors, and cylinders. This is done by a hardware controller.

* High-Level-Format: die logical division of a drive done by software. Generally through the OS.

 

Since the physical division of a drive is normalized either by industry standards, the drive's physical characteristics or purpose, there is no real need for low level formatting by the user. Both higher and low level formatting occur

simultaneously on some media, ie. Diskettes, CD-ROMs, CD-RW or DVD-ROM/RW.

 

Low-Level-Formatting (LLF):

During LLF, the hard drive is divided in Tracks, sectors and cylinders. This is done by the hardware producer.

The actual information remains hidden from the user since there is need to low level format the drive himself. Bad sectors are marked and saved in a so-called P-List.

 

Some older hard drives allowed the user to Low-Level-Format but modern drives catch the LLF command and simply re-initialize the drive. Data is overwritten during a re-initialization and the "bad sector map" is updated. All sectors are tested and faulty ones are marked as bad and made unavailable (these will also remain hidden from the OS).

The new "bad sector list" is stored now in the (G-List instead of the P-List).

 

Low Level Format cannot really repair a HDD, it simply overwrites all DATA and eventually disables newly found bad sectors.

LLF also erases any existing partitions!

 

 

High-Level-Formatting (HLF) is simply referred to as "formatting":

Partitions are created after LLF, continued by the (logical) formatting process, also called high-level-formatting, during which the file type specification and cluster size is set. This is generally done by the OS.

A HLF will generate a disc structure based on the file system (ie. FAT, FAT32, NTFS or HFS).

QuickFormat is basically the same as High Level Format but the sectors are not checked for errors, so it's usually very fast.

 

Hope this helps,

 

hecker

Edited March 9, 2007 by hecker

[HawleyTronics]

Also, low-level zero-ing out of HDD's (popular in the mid-90's) is completely unnecessary with modern drives and even risky if done with the wrong tools.

 

Normally repartitioning the whole drive is enough to get them back working.

 

hecker

 

Rubbish? I think not.

 

I am merely stating the fact that after trying to install OSX on my drive it rendered my drive useless, useless as in the fact that I could NOT repartition it at all. Trying to partition it was useless as it kept telling me that the drive had an error and I could not continue.

So "normally" is not the case here. I tried several methods to repartition it, both Windows, Linux and Partition Commander, none worked.

 

I ended up using MaxBlast to zero-out the drive, whereas it does not take into account how your drive is set up or partitioned for that matter, it "over-rides" it and allows you to apply zero bits throughout the whole entire drive, as if it just came off the assembly line and was ready to partition.

 

After I zeroed-out the drive using that tool, I was then able to partiton it again using the usual methods.

 

Also HLF and LLF are different than zeroing-out a drive, many confuse LLF with zeroing-out. LLF is basically partitioning a drive, HLF is formatting the partition, and zeroing-out is basically applying zero bits throughout the drive.