[smartmontools-support] Samsung HD502IJ new firmware causes i/o error while querying Device Statistics log

[Viktor Štujber]

Alright. I guess only dissecting the firmware could show if those 'badly 
formed scsi parameters' could even be satisfied. Aside from that, I was 
thinking of at least working around the firmware bug so that basic 
functionality isn't affected.

I saw that drivedb is able to target specific firmware versions and 
already has a bunch of -F quirks. Funnily enough, three of the six are 
for 'samsung' and my particular drive is also samsung. I also saw 
documentation for -F nologdir and tried it out, and it doesn't look like 
it does precisely what it says it does... it only stops output of the GP 
log directory, but it still goes through every available GP and S log 
anyway. I guess if this was ever meant to be addressed, I would rewrite 
this quirk to actually apply comprehensively and to allow specifying an 
optional list of log addresses to exclude (0x00 causing all the other 
logs to be skipped as well, which the docs say is supposed to be this 
quirk's intended effect.)

On 12. 4. 2025 12:45, Christian Franke wrote:
> Viktor Štujber wrote:
>> I have two drivers, standard msahci.sys sata controller and 
>> amdide64.sys (AMD PCI IDE Controller). All ATA channels are 
>> registered under the PCIIDE\IDECHANNEL\ path. I can't tell from this 
>> which one is in use (or both?).
>>
>> I booted Grml and captured the smartctl listing. There, the error 
>> message is different, and the query doesn't cause a persistent error 
>> state, so the entry after that (sata phy event counters) gets read 
>> properly. Curiously, the counter "Transition from drive PhyRdy to 
>> drive PhyNRdy" jumped from the previous lifetime total of '97' to 
>> '65535+'. Makes me wonder.
>
> Interesting, possibly another drive firmware bug.
>
>> Anyway, the error message says:
>>
>> ATA_READ_LOG_EXT (addr=0x04:0x00, page=0, n=1) failed: scsi error 
>> badly formed scsi parameters
>> Read Device Statistics page 0x00 failed
>
> This suggests that there is are bugs in the firmware (advertised log 
> page not implemented) and the specific Windows SATA driver (ATA 
> pass-through fails after first ATA command error, possibly until the 
> next non-pass-through command is issued).
>
> Both cannot be fixed in smartctl.
>