Please Help! Samsung HD501LJ geometry - FIXED

sun4384 · Post by **sun4384** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 5:43 pm

My stupid mistake totally screwed up my Samsung HD501LJ, its geometry (cylinder, track, sector, ...), partition information, MBR... It looks the data is still intact.

Those anyone using the same hdd, please help me. I need to know the geometry of the hdd, so that I can find a tool to fix it. Help.....

Post by **NeilBlanchard** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 6:57 pm

Hello,

I think that Samsung prints these numbers on the label? They don't put the units on them, but you can determine what is what?

Or, why can't you just use the Auto setting in the BIOS?

sun4384 · Post by **sun4384** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 7:20 pm

All I can find on the label is LBA 976,773,168, having no idea how that translates into cylinder/track/sector thing.

In the bios, unfortunately, I couldn't find it. The bios just autodetects, but doesn't give further information...

alfred · Post by **alfred** » Fri Feb 23, 2007 8:12 am

http://img83.imageshack.us/img83/304/2h ... amsdy1.png
http://img359.imageshack.us/my.php?imag ... 1ljoe2.jpg
Hope it helps

sun4384 · Post by **sun4384** » Sat Feb 24, 2007 12:14 am

Thank you very much.

I found an excellent partition recovery tool, TestDisk, and got it recover the lost partitions. It is indeed a very fast and feature-rich tool. One interesting thing I learned is that (if I'm wrong, please correct me) modern disks do not expose their geometry directly. They just have LBA size, which is 976,773,168 in case of my hdd.

In the partition table, however, because partition information is stored in the cylinder/head/sector format, the LBA size somehow must be translated to fit into the cylinder/head/sector format. For that, one can choose any number for head, sector, and sector size for a disk, and it happened to be 255/63/512 in my case. I found this number from other disks that were partitioned in the same computer. Given this number, my hdd becomes to have 60801 cylinders. Given this information, TestDisk recovered all my partition information.

Phew....... I though I would lose all 400GB worth of data...... Good to get that back.

Post by **NeilBlanchard** » Sat Feb 24, 2007 7:01 am

Hello,

I have not heard of TestDisk -- can you post a link? I have used GetDataBack which is very good. It recovered all the data on a HD that was one of a pair of RAID 1 array, that had started to physically fail. The other HD was not workable, but and Windows could not even recognize either one.

The nice thing is, you can use it for free, and if it works, then you pay for it in order to save the recovered data.