Forcing a SCSI HDD to rewrite a damaged sector

Question

For a SATA/PATA HDD, this would be the normal procedure: http://www.sjvs.nl/?p=12

But a customer of mine has an old server with actual SCSI drives. I have tried re-writing the sector with dd to no avail; I keep getting the I/O error as per this quote from the above article: "I have a case were using dd to overwrite the sector produces an IO error and no reallocation. But using hpdparm works and forces the reallocation. Amazing."

How do I skip the kernel's block layer and force the drive to rewrite a specific sector? Lots of Googling hasn't found an answer.

PS -- SMART on SCSI HDDs works differently and doesn't show the reallocated sector count.

Did you try following the directions given in the article you linked? — Michael Hampton, Mar 13 '13 at 09:34
The article referred to SATA/PATA HDDs. I am using SCSI HDDs, and hdparm doesn't work with these. — Alastair Irvine, Mar 14 '13 at 02:30

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 27 '13 at 06:47

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You can try sg3_utils for linux. It can do many things with SCSI/SAS disks. For blocks reassign it have "sg_reassign" utility.

answered Apr 27 '13 at 06:47

unlo

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Thank you so much! Hopefully Google will now remember you as one of the last remaining SCSI experts on Earth. :-) – Alastair Irvine Apr 29 '13 at 11:44

Forcing a SCSI HDD to rewrite a damaged sector

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