Maxtor Harddrive unable to format

[magicwonder]

Hi
I have a Maxtor 300gb PATA that I use as secondary HD, and have not been able to format it with windows xp or vista.
I used seatools and maxblast to scan the HD and came with PASS, both short and long scans, but when I try to format it windows freezes both from within disk management and new OS intstall
I tried 0 writting with maxblast, kill disk and bootnuke and got completed with errors, tried disk regenerator and it was unable to complete.
So what is going on with the HD, and if it dying why is the scan PASS?
How do I fix this?
Thank you in advance.

 

[Elixer]

Fix it by RMAing it back to seagate.
Sounds like it is on its last legs.

 

[magicwonder]

Unfortunately, Maxtor had one year warranty.
Contacted Seagate and they were not able tp help.
But what is puzzling is how come the HD scanning tools (HD tune and Seatools) reports are good, and how do you your drive is failing if these tools cant detect it?
Thank you for the reply

 

[Elixer]

There is no 100% way to diagnose the HD if it is about to kick the bucket.
The utils just read SMART info, and if the problem wasn't detected by SMART, then the HD can still fail at any time, even though it 'passed' those "tests".
In google's HD paper, they had a ton of units fail, and those never reported a SMART error either.
Yeah, it sucks.