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It appears Disk Director 10 made my hard drive completely useless.

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I have a Samsung 120 GB EIDE which had a lot of junk data collected over a couple of years. I decided the best way to handle it was to just wipe the drive, using another computer, and reinstall Win XP fresh. At some point during the wipe, DD 10 "hung up" , stalled, whatever you want to call it. It would not respond to any mouse or keyboard actions, and I had to use the computer's "reset" to get out of DD 10. When I was able to get back into operation, I found that the computer could not "see" that drive at all, and a DOS-based diagnostic run from a floppy told me that the drive's S.M.A.R.T. status was BAD. So. how did DD 10 interfere with the SMART setup, and what do I do now??? Is there any way to reset the SMART status short of sending the drive in to the factory???

Bill H

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Bill,

There is no way that TI could have directly caused the SMART status to flip out, but it is possible for it's operations (if you were running disk cleaning) to have put the drive under enough 'stress' to cause it to go from marginal to not at all (in disk terms).

In answer to your question about resetting the drive - you may or may not want to do this. :)

I can't give you specific instructions for a Samsung drive as I'm not sure if the whole drive is Samsung, or if they buy in standard parts and just add their firmware.

However, to access the drives firmware (needed to reset or attempt to reset the SMART flag), you will need a serial port (RS232 connection) a logic level translator (MAX232 or similar) and a terminal program - XP users can use HyperTerminal, Vista and W7 will need to have a terminal program installed.

As you won't have the proper equipment (there is a company in Russia that can sell you a proper device), you would need to perform the following.

1. Remove drive from PC.

2. Remove screws holding the driver board (that's the one you see with the drive upside down), taking note that 2 of the screws will be longer than the others - don't forget where these go.

3. Insert some THIN insulating material over the drive pad contacts.

4. Re-insert the board, loosely tighten the screws just to hold the board and the insulating material in place. Make sure the other set of contacts (to the logic board) are still making contact with the logic board.

5. Attach three wires (Earth, Tx, Rx) to the spare pins that aren't on the jumper diagram - you'll need to hunt down which pin is which - information may be available on the internet.

6. Open up the terminal program - set up the correct parameters - not sure if these are universal.

7. Attach POWER ONLY to the drive.

8. Enter commands that allow you to interact with the firmware (spindrive down etc).

9. Enter the command to find the fault code - check what this code actually means.

10. Enter the command to reset the SMART flag - if possible.

11.Enter the status command.

12. If OK then disconnect power from drive.

13 Reassemble drive correctly.

14. Install drive back into PC.

15. Hold breath and switch PC on.

You can find this information if you hunt enough on both Seagate and WD websites and there are a number of Youtube clips showing the above steps - however these all refer to Seagate or WD drives - this is dangerous stuff, if your drive is stuffed, then you can't damage it any further, if it isn't it is possible to wipe the firmware or write incorrect data to it, in which case some one will charge you much more than a new drive to reflash the EEPROM.

There are some Seagte and WD drives that ahve a known bug in early firmware versions - that can cause the disk to stop being recognised by the BIOS, cause SMART problems and head hunting or clicking (these are all different bugs). Whether this affects Samsung as well I don't know. With Seagate and WD drives you can enter your s/n on their websites and it'll tell you if you have a drive with the firmware problems.

As you can see, it is impossible for DD to have directly caused your SMART problem.

Bodgy:

Thank you.. It sounds as if that's strictly a job for the factory, and I'm sure you're right about it not being cost-effective.

One of the DOS diagnostics I ran said something about the drive having been subjected to temperatures of above 70 degrees C. I discounted that, since I could not imagine how that could happen without any signs of heat on anything else in the machine. There are plastics in there with melting points below that. Hard drives don't cost all that much these days, so I'll chalk it up to experience and get a new drive.

Bill H

In respect to the 70 deg C bit, it is possible for the IC's to have reached this internally - your CPU in the PC can reach 60 or more deg C.

Touch the case of one of your working drives after you've had the PC on for more than an hour or the CPU heatsink - you'll be surprised.