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uniqs
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HDmon
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HDmon

Anon

[hard drive] Resetting SMART to factory, Sort of a Rare Reason.

So I have an external hard drive that was giving me read errors, after leaving the drive connected for a couple of days and trying to repair the "bad" sectors 40% of the drive was bad, I realized the reason it was going so slowly was because it was being bottled necked by USB 2.0 and it wasn't even a third done.

I dismantled it and plugged it directly with a SATA cable, the thing is the drive is fine plugged directly NO BAD Sectors, I decided to do a low level format to get my full drive back and did more testing. The problem was with the enclosure but since it report to smart my "RAW READ ERROR RATE" the computer thinks it is going to die even though it is fine, the problem was the enclosure and not the drive itself.

How do I reset SMART?
daveinpoway
Premium Member
join:2006-07-03
Poway, CA

daveinpoway

Premium Member

Have you contacted the company which made the enclosure? They may be able to help.

Cthen
Premium Member
join:2004-08-01
Detroit, MI

Cthen to HDmon

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Your best bet is to go to the drive manufacturer's site and see if they have a utility to reset the drive. That said...

Trying to reset SMART itself on the mobo is not doable. It's only a reporting tool and nothing more. Resetting anything won't make the enclosure work properly. You will need to exchange the enclosure for a properly working one with the manufacturer if it is under warranty (contact them still even if it's not, they may still replace it).

Other than that, you will need to put the drive into a properly working one for the errors to go away.

aurgathor
join:2002-12-01
Lynnwood, WA

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said by HDmon :

How do I reset SMART?

I kinda doubt that you can reset SMART, and I also doubt that the drive manufacturer would provide their internal utility that can do it.

If it's under warranty I'd put it back into the enclosure and try to get it exchanged under warranty. If that's not doable, you just have a drive with a messed up SMART, and possibly a bunch of needlessly remapped sectors.

koitsu
MVM
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
Humax BGW320-500

1 edit

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Few things:

1. A drive in a USB enclosure returning I/O read errors could be caused by lots of different things -- there is a lot of "middleman" stuff going on which you don't have visibility into. The USB/SATA bridge could be crapping out, the I/O errors could actually be happening at the USB layer (not the ATA/disk layer), and so on.

2. You getting an I/O error has nothing to do with a drive being slow. How do I rephrase this exactly. You said, in linear order: "I had a USB-based hard disk that gave me I/O read errors. I tried to "repair the sectors" (no details of how you did this). 40% of the drive was bad (no details provided). It was slow because of USB 2.0." The logic here makes virtually no sense. You're connecting dots that aren't meant to be connected.

3. Removing the drive from the USB enclosure, assuming it doesn't void warranty, and hooking it up to a native SATA bus, is a good idea. It's how you go about determining if the drive itself is bad or the USB enclosure is causing problems.

However, you need to understand how to examine a hard disk to determine if it truly is responsible for the I/O errors you saw. All you did was run some software (we don't know what), and concluded "no bad sectors". I can safely conclude you did not really understand what you were looking at, did not do a thorough analysis with proper tools, and so on. What you should have looked for was the SMART error log and the SMART extended comprehension error log, which could contained situations where the drive returned ABRT or other statuses (which are not necessarily indicators of unreadable LBAs, but could be indicators of other issues). The short of this is: you have tried to do "bad disk analysis" in a somewhat wonky way, and have concluded a bunch of things + posting on the forum without providing any actual evidence.

4. There is no such thing as a "low level format" through end-user utilities. Please don't use this term unless you know what it actually means. On ATA/SATA drives you cannot do this outside of connecting to the drive directly via a serial interface and issuing vendor-proprietary commands. What you did was just a drive erase (writing zeros, presumably, to every LBA). That is not a "low level format".

Did you save SMART attribute data (screenshots, ANYTHING?) BEFORE you did a full drive erase? You should have. Seeing the attributes before and after matters -- it can help shed light on if your erasing actually repaired/fixed problems (specifically induced LBA remapping).

5. To answer your final question: you cannot reset SMART attributes (values or anything else). They're defined/set in the HPA region of the drive, or a vendor-specific area.

The only thing that is known to potentially (keyword: POTENTIALLY) reset SMART attributes is updating or re-flashing the firmware on the drive itself (and it must be done with the drive connected to a SATA bus natively, not via USB). Most of the time you won't be able to find a firmware for such drives (or if you can, you won't find a firmware update utility); other times the firmware upgrade utility will migrate/merge the existing SMART data during the upgrade, meaning a F/W update won't reset SMART.

If you really want to reset the attributes, then your only choice is the above, or to RMA the drive (the replacement you'll get will likely have its attributes reset, but not necessarily).

You do not appear to understand how to interpret the SMART data you're looking at. Meaning: you're doing what a lot of people do: using weird disk monitoring software that makes a bunch of assumptions ("OMG A NON-ZERO VALUE MEANS PROBLEMS!!" (this is wrong)) and in turn you're freaking out. Don't feel bad, you're not alone in this regard -- it's very common, and there is a lot of software out there that tries to "interpret SMART" but does it entirely wrong (SMART attributes are almost always meant for pure human analysis/review, software is not intelligent enough to do this kind of analysis -- a human engineer familiar with disks and the exact model of drive you have can do this).

What you SHOULD have done before ANY of the above was post here and ask for help. I'm one of the few here who can review SMART attributes and step you through using intelligent/decent utilities (mainly smartmontools) to determine if your disk is actually busted. But since you've gone ahead and done a bunch of things beforehand, all bets are off. :/