Re: Hard drive repair (longish)

On 1 Apr 2005 21:34:05 GMT, et472@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Michael Black)
wrote:

>
>PlainBill (PlainBill47@xxxxxxxxx) writes:
>
>> The conclusion: The flash memory does NOT contain a map of bad
>> sectors. The firmware is either in the flash menory, or in the main
>> controller IC. For my next experiment I will try swapping this
>> between two boards with DIFFERENT firmware.
>>
>This makes no sense. Flash memory is memory, and is bound to be
>where the map of sectors is. Because this is drive specific, it is
>in changeable memory. There would be no difference visually between
>the boards because the part numbers would not change for the
>differing bad sectors.
>
> Michael
>
Think about it: A 200 Gig drive has 280 MILLION sectors of 512 bytes
each. If only .1 % were bad, that is still 280,000 bad sectors (most
drives had far more than .1% bad sectors). Please describe the
algorithm that would allow placing such a map of bad sectors into a
128 Kbyte memory. It is far, far, more likely that the bad sector map
is on the platters themselves.

On the other hand, 128 Kbytes of firmware would seem much more
reasonable especially if the processor itself has a block of bootstrap
code.

PlainBill
.

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