GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - View Single Post - Do you trust sending a defected hard drive back to the manufacturer ?

rowan · 04-11-2005, 07:15 PM

See if Maxtor has a util that can low level format the unit. This is different to a DOS/Windows format, it's like a factory preparation.

My 2 year old IBM drive crapped it with 10%+ of sectors suddenly going bad. I figured it was a head crash, but I did a low level format anyway to ensure that no one could read the valid sectors still. After the low level format the drive worked perfectly! It was a firmware error that caused the crash, not a hardware fault. Since the drive apparently works I can't return it, but I can't use it either since that firmware bug could crop up again at any time.

04-11-2005, 07:15 PM
rowan Too lazy to set a custom title Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Australia Posts: 17,393	See if Maxtor has a util that can low level format the unit. This is different to a DOS/Windows format, it's like a factory preparation. My 2 year old IBM drive crapped it with 10%+ of sectors suddenly going bad. I figured it was a head crash, but I did a low level format anyway to ensure that no one could read the valid sectors still. After the low level format the drive worked perfectly! It was a firmware error that caused the crash, not a hardware fault. Since the drive apparently works I can't return it, but I can't use it either since that firmware bug could crop up again at any time.