Bought a used hard drive, it has bad sectors- fixable or good as trash?

[StattlichPassat]

I bought an 8.4GB Western Digital hard drive off eBay this week and it turns out that it has bad sectors. The seller has a 5 day non-DOA guarantee and will refund my money, but does this count as DOA? It otherwise works fine, I just can't format it completely, as the sectors are at the very end of the hard drive. I installed Win98 over whatever was on there before without formatting and it worked ok on my computer, but it won't work for the target computer, a client's old P90 Acer. Gives me some 'I/O Error- replace disk and press any key', or something like that. ScanDisk is currently having fits with it. There are thousands of bad clusters and it will take hours to fix them. Question is, will that really fix them or do I send this back and tell him to give me a refund, since he said "this disk has zero bad sectors"? I'm not really comfortable giving a hard drive like this to my client, even though it's an old computer to be used for light duty. What should I do? :frown:

 

[ChefJoe]

bad sectors often seem to happen when a head crashes into the disk (via dropping, strong movement, etc) and it starts as a few bad sectors that are mapped "bad" by a reformat and are no longer used, but sadly, the areas which were scratched but readable tend to become scratched and non-readable after a few writes... I'd return it, not worth the hassle if you really intend on fixing that client's computer right. If it were on some little putzy system I were putting together and had a way of making a raid backup of, I'd (personally) keep it, but since it's supposed to work like new when the computer leaves your hands, better fix it up right.

 

[MichaelD]

I agree with ChefJoe, but would like to add one thing. Have you tried running WD's low-level format utility on it? Or any other of WD's "zeroing/factory recert" programs? You can DL them off their site. Bootable DOS floppys. Give it a shot first.

 

[StattlichPassat]

Good idea, no I haven't- I'll check that out. Thanks!

 

[StattlichPassat]

Thanks, ChefJoe- I'm going to try what MichealD says, and if that doesn't work, it's going back.

 

[Lanyap]

<< There are thousands of bad clusters and it will take hours to fix them >>


Return it. Don't waste your time and your client's time. The drive will only get worse. If the seller was truthful and it did not have any bad sectors when he sold it to you then it may have been damaged during shipping.

 

[StattlichPassat]

That diagnostic software only works under Win9x.

I'm just going to return it. Grr.

 

[StattlichPassat]

<< Return it. Don't waste your time and your client's time. The drive will only get worse. If the seller was truthful and it did not have any bad sectors when he sold it to you then it may have been damaged during shipping. >>



Copy that. :disgust: