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**Paul[_32_]** · December 10th 17, 05:19 PM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general

wrote:
I'm speaking about that bad drive (partition) that caused me to lose a
lot of data and could not be repaired. I finally re-downloaded as much
of the data as I could after saving what was salvagable from the drive.
I have now recreated the original drive, minus around 15 or 20 files
that can not be replaced. Since I no longer needed to read that
partition, and it contained a few folders that would not allow me to
delete them, I decided to format it, before I toss it in the garbage.

I did a FULL format on it, and it formatted just fine, said there were
no errors or bad segments. I ran Scandisk on it (win98), and that too
said "no problems". (I only used the quick scandisk, not the one that
takes around 12 hours).

After all that trouble, I cant believe this drive checks out good. But I
wont trust it, so I am going to just trash it. But I did want to see
what a Format would do to it anyhow. I never expected it to work, in
fact I was waiting for the format to fail mid stream.....

Both Seagate and Western Digital have a utility for
carrying out the "short" and "long" drive test. You
can use that for testing a drive. They should also
mark the test cases according to whether they're
data safe or not. A read-only test does not affect
your data. There are also some write tests they carry out,
and you'd want the drive data stored elsewhere when
taking any chances.

In addition to active tests like that, a utility
that reads out S.M.A.R.T statistics will give some
idea of expected drive life. The Reallocated Sector Count,
is the one I use. A Data value of 0 means there are
no problems that the drive chooses to tell you about yet.
Once that value goes non-zero, the more writes you do,
the more chances for making the indicator worse.
If you see the value there changing rapidly in the
wrong direction, then that's a hint you should get
your data off the drive immediately.

S.M.A.R.T is not perfect - if disk trouble involves
a "bad patch", the health indicators will all be green.
(I had this happen once, and that's how I know.)
It's when the errors involves are smeared over the
disk, that the health turning yellow or red on a
key indicator, is a good indication of trouble.
Some brand new hard drives, have a couple yellow
entries already, but this is caused by mis-interpretation
of the data values coming from the drive. Once you understand
which indicators are "reliable", SMART makes a convenient
check.

But doing actual tests provides feedback too, and you
can try that if you have any questions about a drive.
The drive test utilities are available for both DOS
and Windows, but I'm seeing problems with the DOS version
not being able to boot on modern computers. The Windows
version is then the one I rely on.

Paul