mod32patch

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Description

mod32patch provides a Linux/Unix utility that can clear Reallocated and Current Pending Sectors on Western Digital Hard Disks

It may be used in conjunction with mod2patch
that facilitates data recovery from failing WD hard disks.
A power off/on cycle to the hard disk may be required for the new settings to take effect.

mod32patch is an independent project, unrelated in any way to Western Digital Corp. or Christophe Bothamy.

WARNING : THIS SOFTWARE IS EXPERIMENTAL AND NOT WELL TESTED. IT MIGHT VOID YOUR WARRANTY WITH WESTERN DIGITAL. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

IF YOU ARE UNSURE, GET HELP FROM FRANC OR ANY OF THE GURUS IN HDDGURU.COM.

IMPORTANT : You should always :
- generate and keep a copy of mod32ori.bin (mod32patch -r /dev/device) before making any changes so that you can undo the changes in the future.
- verify that mod32new.bin is indeed what you want written to the Hard Disk's Mod32h before you write to it

Origin

Based on my discussion with Franc, offsets 0x54-0x67 and 0x84 onwards should be zeroed to clear the Reallocated/Current Pending Sectors.

Syntax

mod32patch [options] /dev/device

-h : display help
-r : dump Mod 32h into a mod32ori.bin file and generate mod32new.bin patch file
-u : undo the patch by restoring the original mod32ori.bin into your Western Digital HDD
-v : verbose output
-V : show version and exit immediately
-w : write the patched Mod 32h into the Western Digital HDD
--force : force even if no Western Digital HDD is detected

Examples

Dump Mod 32h into mod32ori.bin

# mod32patch -r /dev/sda

write the patched Mod 32h to the hard disk

# mod32patch -w /dev/sda

Undo the patch by restoring the original mod32ori.bin

# mod32patch -u /dev/sda

Compatibility

mod32patch should be compatible with all recent Western Digital HDD driven by a real SATA controller.

Compatibility with SATA-to-USB adapters has not been tested.

Since mod32patch uses SMART ATA commands to manipulate the record, it should work if SMART information can be read from your hard disk.

WARNING

The Mod 32h does not appear to be a real time non-power-on setting. It is unlikely that the hard disk needs to be power-cycled to use the new default setting. If the changes do not take effect, try power OFF and then ON the hard disk.

Download

Source code and releases can be found on the SourceForge project pages.

Compilation / Installation

After downloading the tarball, for example the 1.0 release (mod32patch-1.0.tar.gz), uncompress it :

$ tar zxvf mod32patch-1.0.tar.gz

Change to the source directory, and compile the code :

$ cd mod32patch-1.0
$ make

You should get the mod32patch executable :

$ ls mod32patch
mod32patch
$ ./mod32patch -V
mod32patch v1.0

And run it with root permissions to get or set the value :

$ sudo ./mod32patch -r /dev/sda

You can optionally install the mod32patch utility to the /sbin directory

$ sudo make install

Please note that you only need to run mod32patch once on each WD Hard Disk as the setting change is permanent.

Author

This utility is brought to you by KHONG How Yu.

It was modified from Christophe Bothamy's idle3-tools project.

Low level ATA I/O is done using the sgio.c file of the hdparm project.

License

The mod32patch project is released under the GNU GPL v3.

Thanks

This utility would not have been possible without Franc Zabkar (fzabkar).

Christophe Bothamy for developing the idle3-tools.