I used to love the old sgafrmt.exe Seagate Format utility for that task. Havnt used it for years now, but this sounds like an interesting tool to keep handy.
In a time long ago it was common to low level format a misbehaving MFM or RLL hard disks to resolve problems. I was pleasantly surprised someone has released a tool to format IDE and Sata drives. Normally these are low level formatted by the manufacture and any bad sectors mapped out and a number of sectors are reserved to replace bad sector growth in some cases.
I’ve recently had to recovery data from a drive that failed when the monitor attached to the computer self destructed. While there was no other damage to the system the drive became un bootable nor could it be formatted and re partitioned. I suspect the monitor failure spat something across the drive platters rendering the drive useless.
I then found this it works under 32 bit XP and low level formats IDE and Sata drives.
I am not sure how good it is at re certifying the surface but I’ve used this to return two dead IDE drives to service now and both pass surface testing and have their full capacity.
Look Here -> |
I used to love the old sgafrmt.exe Seagate Format utility for that task. Havnt used it for years now, but this sounds like an interesting tool to keep handy.
What would you do if your server was stolen or failed beyond repair?
http://www.2000cn.com.au/shadowprotect.html
nice one will come in very handy
1x Dm7000, 2x Dm500 SD
11-11-11 - NOW PoxBox
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It claims to run under Windows 2000 but does not nor will it run under 64 bit XP which as Murphy’s Law would have are what I had available at the time. It does run under 32 bit XP however not sure what Vista would make of it.
I have a friend with a P4 Intel pearl server board that eats hard disks both IDE and Sata.
It’s had the power supply replaced and runs on a UPS and has lots of cooling but still did it I think he has retired that now (I hope)
He has a nice pile of 200 GB sata’s that I hope to try this on. I suspect the drives are not physically damaged but the formatting info has been corrupted.
the last low level format i did was some time ago
a 13 or 15g seagate it took over 2 days wouldnt like to do a 200g
have had drives loose boot partitians ect and not accessable under windows ect and have found acronis will fix these drives
The drive I fixed was a 120 gb and the time was around 1 hour from start to finish
hmmm .. must try this some time. I have a heap of old and outdated drives kicking around that I've taken out of old machines or salvaged from hard rubbish collections."The data cannot be recovered after using this utility"
I am sure a couple of them could be used to test the validity of that statement!
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