problem cleaning up old drive

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 21 November 2008, Matthew Flaschen wrote:
>nepal google wrote:
>> On Friday 21 Nov 2008, Hakan Koseoglu wrote:
>>>> I have a 40gb hda drive that I want to completely erase
>>>> and try to re-use following the problems I've had and
>>>> reported to the list.
>>>
>>> If you are destroying the disk, use DBAN or similar.
>>
>> Not destroying, I would like to be able to reuse it, but
>> would like to clear everything off, and even check to see
>> if it is still useable.
>>
>> This is so embedded in my brain! years ago with dos I would
>> have typed in g=c800:5 which would have run a low level
>> format from the disk bios itself and checked for bad
>> sectors and marked them. Something like that. Is that what
>> dban does, or does it just erase at a low level so no data
>> can be retrieved?
>
>dban is about disk security.  Erasing and making it difficult to
>recover.  As for the bad sector issue, my understanding (could be wrong
>about this) is that modern drives automatically drop bad sectors after
>repeated failures.

Tell that to a Maxtor 500Gb I just pulled out, 121 bad sectors, none 
re-allocated.  Buggy drive firmware IMNSHO.

>That said, you could look at
>http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/BadBlockHowTo.txt
>
>Matt Flaschen



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