Interrupted OSX install on drive and now it's full of bad blocks?

I don't believe S.M.A.R.T. is supported on most ATA drives in external enclosures -- or at least none of mine do, including a 'raw' PATA drive that the maker says supports S.M.A.R.T. SATA externals may be a different story but the limitation seems to have nothing to do with the drive itself.

From what I read about this tool, it relies on S.M.A.R.T. protocols to get bad block info, so I have doubts that it would be helpful for you, although I would like to know if it is.

It occurs to me that your TechTools results may be due to it being a Tiger-incompatible version. Do you have the latest one?

I don't believe S.M.A.R.T. is supported on most ATA
drives in external enclosures

Yeah, the smartmontools page says it's apparently theoretically possible but that, in practice, very few do. It's a function of the bridge chip in the enclosure and most just implement a fairly basic set of commands.

From what I read about this tool, it relies on
S.M.A.R.T. protocols to get bad block info, so I have
doubts that it would be helpful for you, although I
would like to know if it is.

Right, it uses information the drive stores in its firmware to show the status of the drive. It also uses commands to cause the drive to test itself. So it's be of no use if the drive didn't support the S.M.A.R.T.

charlie

Robert--

This drive consistently reports the same number of
bad blocks in TechTools so it's not doing any
reallocation at all.

There's a limited amount of storage in the drive's firmware for remapping blocks. Once it's used up, the drive can't allocate any more. I'd suspect that with 28000 or more bad blocks, you've reached the limit of the drive's ability to store any more remapped blocks.

At this point, I would suggest contacting the manufacturer of the drive to see what they have to say. But I'm gonna bet they say the drive is toast.

charlie

I suspect the 28K+ bad block number isn't real but an artifact of the I/O errors Robert noted & how Techtools attempts to detect marginal blocks & mark them as used in the file system. I think he is on the right track in asking about other utilities to check this against; unfortunately I don't know of any, except maybe manufacturer-specific utilities that typically are available only for Windows or sometimes just DOS.

This sort of utility would be ideal in that it can "talk" directly with the firmware & use any propriatary protocols to get & sometimes set info in the drive firmware beyond what ATA standards support. From what the tech said in the URL, it is possible Intech has a similar utility, so maybe Robert should contact them as well.

Well folks I upgraded the firmware in the enclosure
from v3.1 to v3.8 and now the drive reports the
correct capacity and Disk Utility actually lets me
format it.

That's great. Let us know how the rest of it shakes out...

charlie