P-list introduces:
Nowadays, HD density is becoming higher and higher, the common storage capacity per platter has exceeded 100 GB. The manufacturers use more and more advanced technologies, but they can hardly ensure 100% perfection, there are always more or less defects on the platters. The manufacturers perform low-level format on all the HDDs before they leave factory, during the low-level format process, all the defective sectors/tracks will be found and recorded in a special list, that be called as P-List. All the defective sectors/tracks will then be replaced by reserved sectors/tracks, and those defective sectors/tracks will never be used by the HD and the users. Therefore, regular users will not have any problem in partitioning, formatting and checking a newly purchased HD. Generally speaking, all the HDDs record certain amount of defects in their P-List; there may be just a few tens of them the fewest or it could be tens of thousands of them the most.
So, if there is any change or error happened in the P-list, it may cause all bad sectors on the HDD, and it couldn’t recover data in this situation. But depend on the P-list backup and import function, as long as the #51 module is not broken, we could recover data from this HDD.
This case we will study how to backup this important module and how to important this module to retrieve data.
After we connect the drive to Maxtor doctor and click ”load from HDD” or even boot it from safe mode, we could click “View P-list”:
If the #51 is good status, later the Defect Management frame will show the defect records, but if this module was broken, shows nothing!
Then check the recourse the path, we can find a P-list.bin and a P-list.txt file:
The bin file is working for import; the txt file is for engineer analysis.
Then we will study how to import:
Before import, we must clear the original defect record first. Otherwise it may show error status. Clear the original defect record is very simply, just click “empty G/P”:
Then confirm the operation:
Now we could try to import the P-list, click”Import P-list”, and then choose the backup path:
Now we can see the defect record has been imported to the drive, import 32 records to the list once time, a moment later, it will shows “OK”:
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