New Toshiba MK1231GAL not working

[sordup]

I have just received my new Toshiba MK1231GAL 120gb hard drive in order to upgrade my iRiver H340.
The drive is not recognized by Windows and cannot be initialized or formatted by Windows because of I/O error. When attempting to format with SwissNife it tries to read the drive and returns a "Read/Write Error".  Repeated attempts at unplugging and replugging have the same outcome, and this is the also same outcome as I get with plugging it into an old H140 I have for testing and whether I use my new ZIF to CF adapter or my older ribbon style adapter.
My old Toshiba 100gb drive continues to work fine in any of the above scenarios.

I imagine the deal is that I bought a bum drive, but thought I would put it up here in case anyone had any other ideas or similar experiences.

Thanks

[Chronon]

This drive has some special notes in the wiki:
http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/HardDriveReplacement#Toshiba_AN1

It seems someone else has found it to be incompatible with Gigabeats (edit: and USB enclosures) too, so it may not necessarily be defective.  I think it would be interesting to get one of these drives into the hands of a developer to try to figure out what's going on (no idea if you are interested or whether or not your drive is actually functional).

[torne]

If you are willing, I would be interested in looking at the drive to see if I can figure it out. I would return it afterward, of course, and there should be no risk to the drive. Other developers can vouch for my trustworthiness I'm sure

[sordup]

Well I am surprised I wasn't able to determine this earlier through this forum and surprised there isn't much discussion of this here. But it would seem that the Toshiba MK1231GAL drive is not compatible with my iRiver machines (or my computer, for that matter!?). This is strange to me as I have come to depend on the Toshiba drives for my upgrades up until now. I suppose that's why I didn't do good research beforehand.

It does seem, however, that it would be being screamed about somewhere over this forum. Surely I'm not the only one (well, I have seen one other) who has made this mistake.

>torne, I messaged you about what exactly you are offering by looking at my drive but have not heard back.

[Chronon]

We usually try to point people to the HardDriveReplacement page that I linked earlier.  It is a bit out of date now, but it does have a warning about this particular drive.

[torne]

>torne, I messaged you about what exactly you are offering by looking at my drive but have not heard back.

I replied to your email ages ago..

If you post it to me or another dev who lives closer, we can take a look and see how the drive responds to ATA setup, and determine what is odd about it. It seems unlikely that it can't be made to work.

[sordup]

Torne - very sorry, I had expected to see a response here in my message box. I had evidently forgotten how I contacted you. No worries. Thanks for your suggestions.

I suppose I will try to return the drive, but if that doesn't work, is there an index of developers and their locations that I could use to contact someone in that field in order to have it tested.

Or, is there anyway that I can be pointed along the road of testing it myself? Would that require special hardware or just software that I could easily acquire?

Thanks again for your time.

[torne]

There isn't any such index, no, but if you post which country and/or state you are in someone can probably be found.

You could probably do some things yourself, there's no *special* hardware needed but it might be useful to have a way to mount the player over USB, and USB drive enclosures that can take a ZIF drive are not particularly common. (is it a ZIF drive? I don't actually know...) Debugging and testing by "remote control" is kinda tedious, but I'd be willing to help you with that too if possible.

How far do you actually get trying to put Rockbox on it? Are you able to run anything at all? If not then you aren't going to be able to test it very much without a USB connection or a different model of player that can take the drive and boot further.

[sordup]

Well, yes, that's my problem; I don't seem to be able to mount the drive at all. Windows (7, 64bit) Disk Manager "sees" it but will not initialize it. I only receive an I/O error and Swissnife returns a Read/Write error, so no initializing or formatting has been possible for me.
As far as interface goes, yes, it is a ZIF drive, but I have two types of ZIF to 50-pin ATA adapter that work fine for all my ZIF drives up to now.

My location is San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA

[torne]

Well, yes, that's my problem; I don't seem to be able to mount the drive at all. Windows (7, 64bit) Disk Manager "sees" it but will not initialize it. I only receive an I/O error and Swissnife returns a Read/Write error, so no initializing or formatting has been possible for me.
As far as interface goes, yes, it is a ZIF drive, but I have two types of ZIF to 50-pin ATA adapter that work fine for all my ZIF drives up to now.

I assume you mean 40-pin, i.e. standard IDE, so it's connected directly to your pc? That's ideal to try stuff out but you won't get anything useful out of it in Windows.

A good starting point would be to download SysRescCd from http://www.sysresccd.org/ which can be burnt to CD or booted from a USB drive. Have you used Linux before? The dmesg output from booting with only the problematic drive connected would be interesting, as would the output of hdparm -i /dev/sda (or whichever drive it comes up as)

[sordup]

The only connection to Windows available to me is through either of my iRiver (h140, h340) machines through USB. The drive, then, is connected to them with the ZIF to ATA adapter (I believe 50-pin), so no, not connected directly to my PC.

I imagine that makes it a no go still?

I have some, but minimal, experience with Linux.

[cereal_killer]

Hey sordup,

check http://rasher.dk/rockbox/people/ to find developers in your area. You'll find a list and a map of users and developers there.

Or try http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=6006.0

Good luck,

c_k.

[torne]

The only connection to Windows available to me is through either of my iRiver (h140, h340) machines through USB. The drive, then, is connected to them with the ZIF to ATA adapter (I believe 50-pin), so no, not connected directly to my PC.

Whether that's useful or not depends on the drive; it doesn't rule out all possible investigation, certainly.

The same information would be an equally good start. My incredibly vague description above assumes you would have a reasonable amount of Linux command line knowledge

If you want to help investigate this "remotely" as it were, then download sysresccd or some other linux livecd/usb and boot it up and see if you can get network connectivity; that's kinda the necessary starting point.

[sordup]

@CK - Thanks for the map link. That's great!

@torne - I already have, and what minimal Linux experience I've had is with, a Knoppix bootable Linux CD. This boots up a Linux environment. I have used this in the past to troubleshoot hard drives, but only with detailed instructions and/or various shots in the dark. Would this get me the same tools as Sysresccd?

[torne]

Yes, that should be fine. If you can get to the internet from that CD then that's great.

My suggestion for a first set of steps to investigate:

1) Unplug your PC's hard drive(s) if this isn't too inconvenient; this makes it much easier to tell which drive is which in subsequent steps.

2) Boot the livecd and get your internet connection going.

3) Plug in the iriver with the interesting drive in it via USB and wait to see what happens, which will probably be "nothing visible". Give it a minute though, to make sure it's tried whatever it's going to try (not sure what automount/etc stuff Knoppix has, but presumably it's going to fail since the drive is unreadable).

4) Bring up a terminal and run:

Code: [Select]

dmesg > kernellog.txt

to dump the kernel's message log to a file called kernellog.txt in the normal user's home directory.

5) You should be able to open the log and read it from the file manager. The last few lines of the log should be related to the USB device. It should look something like this:

Code: [Select]

[58360.540123] usb 2-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
[58360.717869] Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
[58360.717995] scsi5 : usb-storage 2-1:1.0
[58360.718351] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage
[58360.718353] USB Mass Storage support registered.
[58361.716993] scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access     SanDisk  Cruzer           8.02 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
[58361.718684] sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[58361.724404] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
[58363.624084] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] 15704063 512-byte logical blocks: (8.04 GB/7.48 GiB)
[58363.624688] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[58363.626567] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[58363.626580]  sdb: sdb1

This indicates that the newly inserted device (a Cruzer in this case) has been added as block device sdb (the part in square brackets). If your device produces similar output and it gets a block device name, you can carry on to the next step.

6) Run:

Code: [Select]

sudo hdparm -i /dev/sdb > hdparm1.txt
sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdb > hdparm2.txt

replacing sdb with the device name you found in the last step. Note that the option there is a lowercase "i" in the first command and an uppercase "I" in the second command, neither is an "L".

You should now have three files in the home directory: kernellog.txt, hdparm1.txt and hdparm2.txt. Post them here on the forum (you can attach files to posts, please don't copy and paste the contents) or email them to me or otherwise get them to me and I'll have a look. Also, if anything *did* happen when you plugged the device in (error messages or similar) please post those as well.

I hope these instructions make sense; if you have any problems just ask.