Smart tested BAD discussion

[Mr_Fuchs]

OK , its my lucky weekend i guess another computer for the camp, another AMD to boot. - Free from a real estate office who cleaned out a techies computer, who died. *spooky* Got 3 other grans, but those are p1's - a story for another day

800mhz HP!!!

OK it booted to windows 98 fine all seems to be OK, there is a 60 gig and 45 gig drive.

When i hooked these into my other box, smart tested these as bad. Can this be repaired or is it outside of the realm of software fix and needs a clean room.

[Know Nuttin]

normally outside of the realm of fixable by software. you can try to have the drive manufacturer software clean the drive (may just be bad sectors, which will be labelled as such) but most times, smart errors are mechanical problems and not fixable by home users. At least, that's what I've found.

[Mr_Fuchs]

Well that's nice --

What constitutes a clean room ?

[AzNaLaN15]

i dont really trust smart =/ it says the fitness of my 2 drives r 0 and they've been workin fine for past 6 months...

*knocks on wood*

[dark_15]

You could try a writing a drive to zeroes...

Go to the hard drive manufacturer's site and download their utilities. I have had drives just mis-report their SMART settings and be labeled as 'bad'.

Hope that helps! :)

[Enablingwolf]

I have a 40gig seagate that has been reporting as bad via S.M.A.R.T. For about 4+ years now. It still does rather well and never barfed up on Windows. You could do a surface scan and see if the disk is alright and it just has some minor issues that make it reasonably usable.
I have had cables that were not the greatest and gave smart errors before, once I got new cabling the errors went away.

[AzNaLaN15]

^ haha seeeeee! =] dont trust SMART!

[Enablingwolf]

^ haha seeeeee! =] dont trust SMART!

I trust smart alot. I know when I get errors it is time to look into it.

[Mr_Fuchs]

will try write the drive with0's but how is that possible ? full format isnt the same is it ?

[Enablingwolf]

Zero-ing a drive is more than a format. It is overwriting a drive. Once you zero a drive data recovery is really difficult if not impossible. For home use, one pass is usually good enough.
I use a program called killdisk. It is slower than most but is free, and can be booted from a floppy.

[Stedeman]

Check the manufacture web site for tools, a low level format may be the trick to getting it back up and running right.