On Dec 30, 2013, at 4:22 PM, Robert Moskowitz <rgm(a)htt-consult.com> wrote:
I just got a Toshiba Canvio Desk 2TB external HD that my plans are to
delete the NTFS partition and put on an EXT4 one.
Thing is the first 106MB are unallocated. Why?
Can you post the results from 'parted -l /dev/sdX u s p' that might be useful.
This was new in box?
If this was a Chinese product, I would be worried. I actually found a 'call
home' USB stick once. One MIGHT think that Toshiba has decent quality control. But
why the unallocated space; is this for sector replacement?
Those are hidden on modern drives. When a physical sector is replaced, it no longer has an
LBA, it's reassigned to the replacement. It's one of the reasons zeroing drives is
an almost pointless security task because substituted sectors still contain data and are
erase only the ATA Security Erase functions.
Seems to be a rather nice unit. Drive did not power up until I
connected the USB; very convient not to have to unplug it to save on power usage.
I see, it's in an enclosure, so chances are this is some weirdness on the part of the
vendor who partitioned and pre-formatted the drive, rather than something the OEM did.
I'm a nut, so I'd pull the drive, SATA or eSATA it to a board, and ATA Secure
Erase the thing, take a baseline smartctl -x sample, put it back into its enclosure, and
then GPT partition and format it.
I might even go so far as to use gdisk to partition it twice, once outside and once inside
the enclosure, and make sure the relevant data are identical, in particular the number of
physical sectors. There are some enclosure firmware floating around that misreport the
size of the drive so you end up with a drive partitioned one way in the enclosure and yet
the backup partition is reported as missing or damaged when pulled from the enclosure.
Such enclosure deserve to be returned as defective.
Chris Murphy