'Repairing" a hard drive with a low level format?
 

I just had a 160 Gb Serial ATA drive give a BAD S.M.A.R.T. indication at boot time. Of course it was the C: drive and it had failed in such a way that I could no longer boot into Windows or repair the Windows OS. :rolleyes:

I added a 250 Gb Serial ATA to the system and, after some fooling around, got C: assigned to it, installed XP, and recovered my data from the failed drive.

I'm not kindly disposed to the failed drive since I'll now have to re-install my applications onto the new drive.

The manufacturers diagnostic software confirmed the failure and provided an error code.

I then did a low-level format of the drive and re-formatted it with NTFS.

The diagnostic software now no longer gives a failure indication.

I'm now filling the drive with data and will run a more complete test tomorrow.

What are the odds that this was a one-off problem, or should I think of trashing the drive?

Thanks!

Depending on what happened, it could be that the drive is going. I'd run occasional checks on it. A good utility for dealing with this is Spinrite. http://grc.com/spinrite.htm

A SMART alert verified by the manufacturer's diagnostic software is plenty to get your drive replaced under warranty, assuming it still is covered. The warranty was probably 1 or 3 years, perhaps 2 (retail drive) or 5 (recent Seagate).

I wouldn't use the drive, except perhaps as a scratch disk or similar.


PS. SMART alerts point to something worse than the only thing a low-level format would 'fix', bad sectors.

That's what, an $80 or $90 replacement to get a new drive?

I would replace it. It's going to fail again, I don't think anybody here will argue that, just a matter of time.