Fix hard drive?

M

Marvelous

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Apr 26, 2003
Messages
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I bought a used Hitachi hard drive from a guy from this site.

When I check with Norton Partition Magic the file system says "BAD"

Now I can read and write files but sometimes my computer crashes or my computer won't even boot with the drive attached.

I have tried partitioning the drive and it won't even let me do that.

Anyone know what is going on? Should I low level format?
 
So fdisk it out and redo the drive partitions. Partition Magic is notorious for spotting errors that don't actually exist, and I wouldn't trust it anymore. It's stuck at version 8.05, hasn't been updated in over 3 years now, and there are better and more reliable disk partitioning tools out like GParted (totally free), Acronis Disk Director (pay), Paragon makes some tools, etc.
 
Since its a hitatchi drive, go to their website / download section and download the "Drive Fitness Test" they have a bootable cd image you can d/l and run the advanced test on the drive.

I would want to be sure the drive is good before i trust loading data onto it.
 
bbz_Ghost said:
So fdisk it out and redo the drive partitions. Partition Magic is notorious for spotting errors that don't actually exist, and I wouldn't trust it anymore. It's stuck at version 8.05, hasn't been updated in over 3 years now, and there are better and more reliable disk partitioning tools out like GParted (totally free), Acronis Disk Director (pay), Paragon makes some tools, etc.
Click to expand...

After I did the low level format, partition magic seems to be working. The problem is the ramdom crash and boot problems whenever I have this drive attached. :( Hopefully this will cure the problem or I will have to RMA the drive or the trash.


Javelin3o4 said:
Since its a hitatchi drive, go to their website / download section and download the "Drive Fitness Test" they have a bootable cd image you can d/l and run the advanced test on the drive.

I would want to be sure the drive is good before i trust loading data onto it.
Click to expand...

Tell me about it. I lost about 20 gigs of data that I had on there. I did a low level format with drive fitness. took about 2 hours. :confused:
 
Well I'll slide on the "low level format" stuff, but did you actually run the DFT itself, Quick and Advanced tests, and if so did the drive give back a result code of 000000? If not, then it's defective and can't be trusted. If it did, then it could have just been an oddball quirk.

Personally even after it's formatted (high level, not low level which is only done once in the lifetime of drive and all modern formatting tools are high level), I'd still run the DFT once or twice a week for a while to "keep an eye" on that drive.

First sign of trouble or the same behavior again, chuck it.
 
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