hard drive becomes fixed?

[Totem]

Hi guys, got a 500gb western digital hard drive. Was playing hl2 and pc froze - restarted windows and the drive had gone. Restarted and bios showed s.m.a.r.t error for the drive. I restarted and luckily the drive was back so I started to backup all the data - this took about 5 days as errors, 1/0 errors and also the drive just not being seen by the pc.

During this time the pc was very sluggish on a fairly fresh install of xp pro sp2. I decided to run the western digital diagnostic tool - when the drive actually showed up on the program. The drive had too many bad sectors to complete - I rang to get an rma from scan.

I thought I would format the drive to clear all my info and ran dban which however would not run due the drive having bad sectors etc. I formatted the drive to a Linux format (windows would error on trying to format to ntfs). Once back in windows partition magic would format back to ntfs so I did/

Now I just decided to run the western digital tool again and at the moment it seems to be fine, the drive only got 8 hours into the test the first time – I’ve already passed 20 hours now. Was it possible that the drive was never bad and I’ll have to cancel the rma, or is it likely to go bad again?

Thanks.

[Viper81]

Personally I wouldn't trust it, the cost of storage is so little these days it's not worth taking the risk. I have had experiences where Windows was sure that a drive had bad sectors but a full scan with a drive diagnostic tool from a bootable floppy showed no problems. Haven't used the Western Digital tool myself ..

[Hunain]

That happened with me, My drive used to freeze, Seagate software used to give bad sector alerts as well, but it was the power connector in my case, the two joint connectors, one powering the HDD and the other powering my case fan, the case fan was causing the trouble, took it off, the drive is perfectly fine now...no bad sectors etc...

[Totem]

ill give scan a ring, ill see if they are happy to take it back when i present my findings, see if i can waver the restocking fee if it aint faulty.

[Totem]

Once this diagnostic tool is done ill try running dban again to see if i get any messages too.

[Lourdes]

RMA it. But this does sometime happen when drives don't shutdown properly, they panic a bit and you get bad sectors that aren't necessarily bad that cna be reset with diagnostic tools.