Reformatting Old Disc

[firebird32]

Changed a hard disc for a friend of mine because his old one has too many bad sectors, it was a fujitsu mpg3204at. Anyway i thoght that id low level format it to set it to its facory settings, i remembered that this was possible with older discs, however with more modern discs you usually use a program from the manufacturer, could i find one...could i hell.. anyone have a work around for this as id like to give it back to him for extra storage, but not if it is just going to fail again

[Nexus UK]

I normally just tag it on my pc then use XP to sort it out for me.

What operating system will it be used with?

the problem is that if you/he use 98/se then it will keep demanding a thorough scandisk every time it hits a slight problem.

with xp it can be scanned and formatted( with problems or not) in a quarter of the time of 98.

Also if you want standalone utility, try the Maxblast software from maxtor or Datalifeguard tools from western digital

these have been known to work on some/most other disks

[balamm]

Killdisk 2 professional will clean everything off and leave you with a virgin drive. Just fdisk and reformat when it's done.

http://www.klboard.ath.cx/index.php?showto...3&hl=killdisk+2


If you have trouble getting this one, the single pass is free. Just search google for it.

[firebird32]

i tried fixing it with xp pro but it remained unstable even after wiping fdisking and reformatting tats why i thought that a low level format was the way to go. for some reason xp refuses to tag the bad sectors and quarentine them

[Nexus UK]

have you tried any of the other utilites mentioned ?

i looked in my old p.c bits today at the dodgy drives (they have that written on them) and one of them is 10gig fujitsu that is like a minefield in afghanistan

you quarantine one sector and the next boot up another one happens.

maybe some one will have another answer for you on here , but taking a component engineering line (wooo)

BIN IT.

[balamm]

Originally posted by balamm@8 September 2003 - 09:32
Killdisk 2 professional will clean everything off and leave you with a virgin drive. Just fdisk and reformat when it's done.

http://www.klboard.ath.cx/index.php?showto...3&hl=killdisk+2


If you have trouble getting this one, the single pass is free. Just search google for it.

low level format was the way to go

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[lynx]

If it has hard sector errors, there is really only one solution - as Nexus says, BIN IT.
It will be so unreliable you would not want to store anything on it, so it is useless as extra storage.

Low level formatting was only really an option on very early drives (back in the days where there were only about 44 disk types), and even then it was a very unreliable and time consuming process if you didn't have the original error table. I'm pretty sure you would need a specialist prog for more modern drives, and the manufacturers don't like to release them.