Hi All !

I've just experienced the strangest thing, and it's really got me stumped.

I've bought a couple of Samsung F1 1TB drives. I'm currently using two Western Digital 500 GB drives in my system, and since I didn't want to go through the trouble of re-installing my system, I decided to clone the boot disk.

For this I used Acronis True Image 10 (and 11 in a second try).

Since I only own one desktop PC, and I've learned before that it's not a good idea to try and clone the OS/bootdisk on the same system the disk is currently running from, I decided to remove the disk from the system, put it in an external USB enclosure and connect it to my laptop. I also put the new destination 1 TB disk in a different enclosure and also connected it to my laptop. After this, I started the cloning process.

The original disk was partitioned in one primary partition of 50 GB (OS) and one extended partition with one logical partition of 400 GB (approx.) for the data. I used the automatic settings of Arconis True image, which means the partitions on the destination disk are created with the same percentage of storage. (in this case, simply doubled: 100 GB OS partition, 800 GB data partition).

The cloning itself too HOURS, way too much in my opinion, but I put this down to the sluggishness of the USB 2 interfaces both harddisks were subjected to.

After ten hours or so, the cloning was successfully finished. I could see in my Windows Drive management screen that the cloning was indeed successful. All partitions were made, and all data was copies. I could access the data on the cloned drive (the Samsung 1 TB).

I then removed the disk from the system (via the 'remove USB device icon etc), and put the disk into my main desktop system. Result: error, no boot. Strange.

I put the disk back into the USB enclosure and connected it again to the laptop. What I saw then blew my mind! In the Windows disk management software, I could see the disk, but it only showed as a disk of 32 MB! No more! I can partition this space if I want to, but also removing the partition does not show a larger disk size than 32 MB anymore.

I'm guessing this is the 32 MB of cache that is showing, and that the diskspace of 1 TB is 'gone' (no idea where!). I also booted a Knoppix Linux CD to see if it showed the same thing, and it did! For some reason this disk has been transformed from a 1 TB disk into a 32 MB disk!

I tried low-level formatting it, but the low level application refuses to start because the disk is too small!

I then guess this was maybe a one-off, and beacuse I used Acronis True Image 10. I then downloaded version 11. Then, after another 10 hours of cloning, I ended up with exactly the same 'symptom'. That second disk had also turned into a 32 MB disk! Talk about strange!

I have NEVER experience this before, and I don't know what to do, other than trade in these disks under warranty (which won't be a problem BTW, but I would rather know what's causing this!).

Why does this happen? Could this be because I cloned them via the USB interface instead of connecting them straight to the SATA interface. Even better: anyone got any idea how I can fix this?

Thanks for any input you can provide!

Most likely a 32-bit truncation error in a device driver somewhere.

It's taking the 1TB byte count, which requires 48-bits to represent in binary, and probably using only the bottom 32-bits (or 31-bits) of it. Which in this case might result in an oddball value like "32MB".

Upgrade the chipset drivers and try booting again.

As for the "slow" copy time.. USB does about 30MBytes/sec max.
So for 1TB, that's 1000*1000 MBbytes, divided by 30, giving a theoretical best time of 555 minutes, or half that for the 500MB original drive. Odds are good that the copy s/w may not overlap reading/writing by 100%, though, so that number could double.

Cheers

Normally I would agree with you, but this system runs on the most recent drivers. Also, BEFORE the cloning, the drive showed its available size of 1TB just fine. It's only AFTER the cloning things went south.

So it looks like this cloning process has 'done something' to the drive, making it show it's available size as only 32 MB. Also, immediately after the cloning, before the drive was powered down, it still showed the size as 1 TB, and all files copied to it could be accessed. It's only after the drive got powered down and turned on again that the size now shows as 32 MB. It's like the drive got flashed or something...


Yeah, I figured as much. That by itself didn't worry me for exactly that reason.

You somehow locked the HD?

How could I have done that? And better: if this is the case, how can I unlock it?

That's a possibility. When you looked at it using Knoppix, was that still on the laptop with the USB enclosure? It may be that the USB enclosure has some kind of terrible bug when used with very large drives. (Which would be a bit weird, as the drive is one "decimal terabyte" in size, so rather less than 2^31 sectors.)

How big does it look if you stick it in your desktop using real SATA, and boot the Knoppix CD on that? What does the relevant bit of dmesg say?

Peter

Yes. It's a Raidsonic ICY box enclosure which has never given me any problems as of yet. Also, before the cloning it worked perfectly with the drive. Oh yeah, I've already tried a different (brand) enclosure than the ICY box, but with this enclosure it also only shows 32 MB.


Good question. I couldn't say since I haven't yet tried that. I also can't try it right now since I'm not a home at the moment. But when I get home, it'll be the first thing I'll do!

Ok, update. I've now found out that even in the BIOS of the desktop PC, the Samsung drive shows as 33 MB. So it seems something has happened to this disk and Acronis is at fault. (or maybe the fact that I did the cloning via 2 USB enclosures...)

I'll see what Knopix has to say now...

Update: Knoppix doesn't boot. At a certain point it says : Cannot unite read-only media and initial ramdisk - shutdown hda - system halted.

Then I get a few read errors on the cd-rom for some reason (even though I'm 100% sure the CD is ok). And finally it ends in : no filesystem could mount root, tried reiserfs, ext3, ext2, msdos, vfat, iso9660, fudseblk. Kernel panic - not synching : VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown block (1,3)

Then the system halts.

I guess I'll give llow level formating another try. But if that doesn't work, I guess the hd's are FUBAR'd.

I've now got Samsung's own HD UTIL software working (dos disk with small app).

This is what disk info says:

Model name: Samsung HD103UJ
FW Revision: 1AA01110
Current size: 31 MB (LBA: 65134)
Native size: 953869MB (LBA: 1953525168)
Current AAM mode : disabled
LBA Mode : support
LBA 48 bit mode: ON
DMA mode :support
NCQ mode : support
Maximum queue depth: 32


As you can see it says the s
current size is 31 MB... but it also says the native size is 953869 MB !

I'll try low level formatting now... but then I give up.

Update.
Ok, even the low level utility insists it's a 31 MB disk. I can manually enter the larger LBA number and then the size shows fine, but once it starts formatting it drops back to 31 MB.

I give up. I'll RMA the drives.

Something you ran under windows has gone and set the "host protected area" feature of the drive, hiding most of its capacity.

The drive itself is fine, and can be restored with a quick tweak.

If you can attach it directly (not USB) to a working Linux box (or the latest Ubuntu LiveCD), then get the latest version of the (my) hdparm utility from sourceforge (Ubuntu-8.04 has it installed by default), and use the -N flag to restore the drive to full capacity.

Something like this:

hdparm -N /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
max sectors = 65134/1953525168, HPA is enabled

hdparm -Np1953525168 /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
max sectors = 1953525168/1953525168, HPA is disabled

Cool!
I have a PC here, which I was reserving to install Ubuntu on. I might as well do it now. (well, tonight or tomorrow I mean; I'm currently at work)

I'll install Ubuntu onto this system and follow your advise. I'll then get back and report about it here.

Question though: do I need to enter all commands exactly as you typed them here?
eg:
hdparm -N /dev/sdb <enter?>
/dev/sdb:<enter?>
max sectors = 65134/1953525168, HPA is enabled <enter?>

hdparm -Np1953525168 /dev/sdb <enter?>
/dev/sdb:<enter?>
max sectors = 1953525168/1953525168, HPA is disabled <enter?>


Thanks a lot Mark, you're a lifesaver!

hav you got any idea how this happened? Is Acronis the culprit here (if they are, I'm going to write them a hefty email!), or is it due to the fact that I did the cloning via two USB enclosures? (which, IMO, also should be covered by Acronis, or otherwise they should simply not offer the option of cloning disks like that)

Also I'm curious: what's this Host Protected Area?

FWIW I have just had (different) issues with the Samsung F1 drives.

The Silicon Image Sil3112 cards I use would see them but then hung the machine.

I managed to buy another Sil card with a flashable onboard BIOS and a freedos flash upgrade fixed my issues.

Elsewhere on the web I found that people needed to use the samsung utility to downgrade the drives to 150Mbs (the jumpers don't always seem to do the trick) - I didn't investigate the sw.

I bought 4 2-way Sil 3132 PCI-e drivers ($16 each from china) and am currently installing 5 of these beasts in my Myth/video/media box.
(should keep Mrs lbt happy for a while)

I usually always buy Western Digital HD's because that brand has never let me down yet. But as the cards lay on the table right now, it's hard to look away from the Samsung F1 series. They are the fastest 1 TB drives available, and even more they are also the quietest, coolest and cheapest.

Also, WDC does not (yet?) have a comparable product. They have their GreenPoint series which go up to 1TB, but those are 5400 RPM drives.

No, all you need is:

hdparm -N /dev/sdb<enter>
hdparm -Np1953525168 /dev/sdb<enter>

The rest was the output that you should see from the commands.

Thanks! As you can see, I'm not that Linux savvy yet.

Cheers!

That's okay. We don't mind helping people learn.

In this case, Mark used a convention of bold text being commands you enter on the command line (followed by <enter>), and non-bold text being the text you see as a result.

Other people will use a convention that uses a leading string to denote a command prompt, and you only type in the things that have the leading command prompt:

There, the command prompt string is "unix>". It's usually just abbreviated to ">", but it may be any arbitrary string, such as a machine host name, or the directory the user was in when executing the commands, and isn't any different than the usual "C:\>" you'd see for a DOS prompt.

Cheers,

Heh... you might not think so, but I used to be quite DOS savvy, so the prompt doesn't seems all that weird to me. I even long back to the DOS days sometimes. That's the main reason I want to learn more about Linux, but I have to admit that I'm pretty lazy about this and always postpone it.

I feel so stupid not recognizing those commands. I guess ten years of Windows GUI has garbled my brain.

Thanks for the explanation!

And you'll likely also need to do sudo bash before attempting the hdparm commands.

Cheers

"sudo -s" prevents the running of the shell of Satan. (Unless you're already corrupted.)

Update: everything is fine!

I was able to fix the HD's with a little util Samsung provides for it's harddisks, ES Tool. Essentially I was able to use this utility to Set Max Address and Recover Native Size. This worked like a charm, and now my disks are fully operational with their intended space.
So Mark was correct about the problem (not that I doubted him!), but I was able to fix it easier than his solution. Well, maybe not easier, but faster anyway since I didn't have an Ubuntu system readily available here. All this took was creating a dos boot disk with this utility on it.

Thanks so much for helping me with this problem. I've learnt something new: I had no idea something like "Host protected area" existed!

Thanks very very very very much to all who've helped!

TiVos and other devices use the HPA feature to lock the drives to stop people tampering with it.

And that's really helped them dominate the market.

Wow, had the same issue, just RMAd it. Will bear it in mind if the replacement has issues.

My new HDs just turned up, let's hope it works straight iut of the box

I don't know what you did the first time you encountered the problem, but chances are, if you do the exact same steps again, you'll end up with a 32 MB drive again as well...

Make sure your motherboard is running its most recent bios and be wary of external HD enclosures using older chipsets...

OK, will let you know what happems

Worked fine, no faffing.

Great!