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fixing hard drive errors with WD Diags

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techidave:
I have a question about Western Digital Diagnostics testing procedure.  If I run the extended test, it first runs the quick test.  It found a read error of -23 (or maybe a -3) but i don't remember for sure.  It then asked if I wanted to go ahead with the extended test and I said yes.  At the end it said it had fixed the problem but didn't ask me if I wanted to fix the problem it just went ahead and did it.

Should I trust that it did fix it?? :tellme:  This  was a WD300BB drive made back in 2001.  I went and rested the drive and it didn't find any errors.

I am not sure about putting this  back in the classroom and then having to redo it again a month for now.   :-\

This is the first time I have had the diags fix a problem so I am a little hesitant if it will run for a long time or not.

Dave

mwb1100:
Chances are that the diagnostic simply 'mapped' the bad sector to a spare sector that has been set aside for that purpose.

If you're not confident in the stability of the drive you could try running an alternate diagnostic that does a surface scan or maybe just replace the drive (it's getting long in the tooth anyway) - you can get a drive that's considerably larger than 30GB for as little as $50.

It all depends on whether you want to spend time or money to get your confidence in the drive back (or just take wddiag's word for it).

tinjaw:
Having run the WD diagnostic tools for about 30 hours these past three or four days (I kid you not) I can confirm that it indeed did just map bad sectors to spare sectors. You should be just fine.

techidave:
I think I will let it go back to the classroom as it and see what happens.  I could run Spinrite on it but it takes so long to complete.  I could wait and run it over the weekend to see how it does.

Dave

f0dder:
Friends don't let friends get fooled by the spinrite snake oil...

All drives manufactured the last many years have had a pool of spare sectors that bad sectors can be remapped to. The catch, however, is that this is only done on write to the sector, not read... so traditional systems like NTFS will detect the bad sector and map it as bad in the filesystem metadata structures, and won't try to read the sector again.

Then comes half-educated power-user that's been charmed by the GibsonGibberishTM about magic bitpatterns and magnetic surface scrubbing, and is amaaaaazed when Spinrite magically repairs the disk omfg!. And what does spinrite do? It tries to read and re-write the sector a lot of times. This will usually result in the drive reallocating the sector (check your drive's Rellocated Sector Count S.MA.R.T property), and "fix" the problem... but ask your self what kind of stress continually trying to access a bad sector puts on the drive.

I wouldn't use spinrite on a dying drive before I had made an image of all the readable sectors, simply because the drive might very well die in the process of spinriteing it. And I hate how the guy is getting away with pushing his snake oil simply because he's paid convinced a number of prominent names to praise it. And he makes it sound like it's hard to program in assembly, heh.

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