Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 500G USB drive sector 0 failure

[chadr]

I've been using a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 500G USB drive for 3 years with the pogoplug v2. Last week arch did not boot back up, so I did a little troubleshooting. After installing the latest U-boot and the latest arch on a spare usb stick for testing it worked fine. I then planned to format the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 500G as ext3 and restore from backups. It was running ext2 for the past 3 years. The drive would not allow the partition to be created. Dmesg complained of an error on sector 0.

I plugged the drive in to Win 7 and ran most or all of the Seagate diags and no error was found. The drive can partition and format under Windows using NTFS just fine. I can copy data to the drive fine in Windows.

However, it does not work under linux correctly. An I/O error is reported and the dmesg log shows sector 0 indicated as a problem. Same problem in the latest arch (http://archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM ... est.tar.gz) on the pogoplug and also in Ubuntu on my desktop.

The drive has been running for nearly 3 years non stop so I understand it could have failed. However, why is it working fine in Windows, yet not working on my latest Linux OSes? Could something have changed in the Linux OS that is causing the drive to not work? Does Windows ignore sector 0, while Linux requires it?

Thanks.

[moonman]

Don't lnow how windows manages it, but you should be able to remap bad sectors. Get Hiren's Boot CD and run VIVARD on whole disk. Though this.may just be a temporary solution. I wouldn't trust the drive with important data anymore. It should force remap all bad sectors. I had 2 seagate drives fail in goflex. Then I got WD green and had no problems. Seagates overheat like crazy in that enclosure.