Hard drive needs low-level format?

[Jerry Feldman]

On Mon, 20 Jan 2003 12:36:21 -0500
"Hewitt Tech" <hewitt_tech at attbi.com> wrote:

> I ran into an interesting (more like terrifying) problem with a Maxtor
> 80 gig D740X-6L drive. The drive has been in service for perhaps 9
> months. Within the last couple of weeks I noticed that the system,
> running Win2k Pro, was taking longer to boot. I reviewed the event log
> and found that at the start of each day of operation, going back over
> a week or so, the system was logging bad block disk errors. Finally
> after the system failed to boot twice in a row, I put another Maxtor
> drive in the system as a slave and mirrored the data to the new disk.
> The new disk appears to be working trouble free.
> 
> Here's the interesting part: I called Maxtor this morning and was told
> by the tech who answered my call that the disk needed a low-level
> format. I mentioned to him that the disk's Smart monitoring status was
> Ok. He said that I was seeing file system corruption and that the
> regular Windows scan disk utility wouldn't help with bad block
> replacement.
> 
> What are other people's experiences with these drives? The drive does
> not overheat AFAIK, but I do notice that the problem is more
> pronounced at system startup then after the system has been running
> for a while.
I've seen this before, quite a while ago where the disks were not
properly formatted. I've seen them where they had been formatted with
the incorrect bad block information. This sometimes comes from the disk
data being copied in a manner that does not preserve the bad block data
setup at the factory when the initial low level format was done. Your
best bet is to back up any data on there and do a low level format to
rebuild the bad block tables.


-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
 

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