Hard drive : bad blocks - should I return the drive

Grant

Grant

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The drive is a WD Elemements 2.5" 1TB.
Out of the blue, for no apparent reason the partition suddenly failed to mount.
The drive is used with a Mac.

Using "Disc Utility" on the MacBook Pro, the drive appears but shows the partition is not mounted.
Disc Utility is unable to force the partition to mount either, so I am assuming some type of damage has occurred to the partition structure.
Various HD utilities are able to see the files / folders on the drive, but also indicating bad blocks at the beginning of the drive.
Recovery of the data appears to be no problem (recovery in progress at the moment).


The drive itself was a late night emergency purchase from Inc Con.

The question is this, once data has been recovered should I do a low level format in an attempt to sort out the drive, or simply return it to Inc Con.
And if returning it to Inc Con, what are the prospects of exchanging it for another Make - ie Seagate.
I cannot face the prospect of dealing with anymore defective WD drives (I have 5 of the things) & endless warranty issues as I have experienced with WD (but no other manufacturer).
 
Bad blocks as in bad sectors? Those are physical faults. Usually from physical impact or old age. There's no buffing those out.
If the drive's new, take it back under the warranty.
 
Make sure you clean the drive before you go, I have heard that IC resells old drives (not sure how relevant anymore).
 
Sounds like it was dropped. If it's a new drive definitely take it back.
 
Take snapshot of the drive SMART. Run tests, long SMART and WD diagnostic.
After you fill-up with zeros, bad sectors might be hidden by firmware, so do above tests before cleaning your data.
 
froot said:
Bad blocks as in bad sectors? Those are physical faults. Usually from physical impact or old age. There's no buffing those out.
If the drive's new, take it back under the warranty.
Click to expand...

You can get a false positive on a bad sector. If it's a single bad sector at the beginning of the drive then a low level format will usualy sort it out. Seatools for DOS works well for almost all drives, i'm just not sure how you'd run it on a MAC.

Having said that, i'd return the drive just on the basis of it being a WD. I've had my fill of WD drives about 10 years ago when the 80Gig was the norm. We had so many issues with those drives it wasn't even funny.

Go Seagate.
 
Did some googling about low level formatting and I think ODTech was talking about this version of LLF. Very interesting stuff.

In any case, take the drive back and replace it.
 
shauntir said:
Did some googling about low level formatting and I think ODTech was talking about this version of LLF. Very interesting stuff.
Click to expand...

What does "low level format" a SATA or ATA (IDE) drive mean?

Actually the term "low level" is a bit of a misnomer. The low-level process first used years ago in MFM hard drives bears little resemblance to what we now call a "low-level format" for today's SATA and ATA (IDE) drives. The only safe method of initializing all the data on a Seagate device is the zero fill erase option in SeaTools for DOS. This is a simple process of writing all zeros (0's) to the entire hard disk drive.
Click to expand...

.
 
Neo_X said:
Pnder meet Shauntir .... Shauntir meet Ponder :P :P :P
Click to expand...

No problem, people use the term incorrectly and it does not apply to modern drives. I don't see how writing all zeros to a drive can be considered a LLF.

Anyway you are better off using the drives own onboard secure erase feature which most modern drives come with these days.
 
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