Hard drive works only with linux

[Modelworks]

I posted on the hardware forums a couple days ago about some drives I got with a broken NAS.
This is the original info I posted.
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2247946&enterthread=y

A friend got a couple NAS that contain several 250GB hard drives.
The NAS are damaged because someone pulled the network interfaces out with the devices on and damaged the interface. Anyway I was given the NAS boxes.


I was going to salvage the drives so I removed and installed one of them.
It did not spin up when the pc booted, and the bios just shows a blank space for the sata port , normally it would show not connected or no drive.

I swap the drive back to the NAS, the NAS fans start and about 10 seconds later the drives spin up. I place the drive back on the pc and get the same results, no spin up.

So I place the drive back in the NAS and wait till it spins up, then swap just the sata cable with the pc one, keeping the drive powered. The drive shows up fine in the bios and formats, passes all test, etc.

Power off the pc and drive and restart with it connected to the pc, the drive again appears dead. Place it in the NAS and do the sata cable swap and its fine again.

I know some drives have delayed spin up, but I also have a Raid card that supports that and yet the drive refuses to spin up on anything but the NAS.

Is anyone aware of any custom firmware being used on drives to keep them from spinning up unless in the original device ? I know about locked drives, but the tools from Western Digital say the drive is not locked and that delayed spin up is disabled.

All 4 of the drives behave the same way.

The NAS are made by Allied Telesyn and don't show on their product list.

This one really has me stumped.

Today I moved around my pc and had forgotten I left one of the drives connected. I booted the pc and it defaults to linux, but I wanted to boot into xp so I let the linux boot finish, shutdown and restarted, booted into windows. To my surprise the drive that I couldn't access before was now showing and working.

I figured linux had to of gotten the drive to spin up as that was the only thing that changed.
I'm in Ubuntu now and looking at the logs I found this:

Nov 17 11:23:00 modwork-desktop kernel: [ 3.158230] scsi0 : ata_piix
Nov 17 11:23:00 modwork-desktop kernel: [ 3.158336] scsi1 : ata_piix
Nov 17 11:23:00 modwork-desktop kernel: [ 3.159014] ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x1f0 ctl 0x3f6 bmdma 0xf000 irq 14
Nov 17 11:23:00 modwork-desktop kernel: [ 3.159018] ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x170 ctl 0x376 bmdma 0xf008 irq 15
Nov 17 11:23:00 modwork-desktop kernel: [ 3.632063] ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
Nov 17 11:23:00 modwork-desktop kernel: [ 3.640257] usb 1-2: new low speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 4
Nov 17 11:23:00 modwork-desktop kernel: [ 3.817255] usb 1-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Nov 17 11:23:00 modwork-desktop kernel: [ 3.836314] ata1.00: HPA unlocked: 488395055 -> 488397168, native 488397168
Nov 17 11:23:00 modwork-desktop kernel: [ 3.836320] ata1.00: ATA-7: ST3250620AS, 3.AAK, max UDMA/133
Nov 17 11:23:00 modwork-desktop kernel: [ 3.836322] ata1.00: 488397168 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)
Nov 17 11:23:00 modwork-desktop kernel: [ 3.881230] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133

Anyone know what linux is doing here that not even the bios or windows can do ?
I would love to know why linux can make the drives spin up and work and how that is done.

 

[sourceninja]

I'd suspect it has something to do with the HPA hiding the entire drive. There are windows tools to unlock HPA areas and there are ways to do it in linux. Formating does not clear an HPA. Linux will capture an HPA by default and windows does not. There are tools for both linux and windows that will let you remove the HPA.

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: sourceninja
I'd suspect it has something to do with the HPA hiding the entire drive. There are windows tools to unlock HPA areas and there are ways to do it in linux. Formating does not clear an HPA. Linux will capture an HPA by default and windows does not. There are tools for both linux and windows that will let you remove the HPA.

Problem solved finally !
It wasn't related to the HPA.
Apparently when the drive powers on , it powers on in standby mode, waiting for a special string of characters before it spins up and can be accessed. Someone could get those values , modify the firmware and it would work like a regular drive.

Thankfully someone PM'd me an easier way.
A program called Hdat2.
http://www.hdat2.com/
It allowed me to turn off the support for power up in standby mode It now works like any other drive.

It was as simple as going into the drives command list and changing the option to disabled.

pic of the options:
http://www.hdat2.com/preview/picture07.jpg


I never realized there was so many options on a hard drive until I ran that program.
I will be making it part of my toolkit from now on.

 

[sourceninja]

Very cool.

 

[degibson]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
Apparently when the drive powers on , it powers on in standby mode, waiting for a special string of characters before it spins up and can be accessed.

What a horrible feature. I suppose I can see some uses for it, but I don't think it justifies sacrificing compatibility.

Anyway, neat post, Modelworks.