Jeff Liebermann wrote:

I buy piles of them from the local recyclers. Those are the ones that
work. You should see the piles and piles that didn't.


Damn, that can be time consuming, for sure. I'd like to compare notes
on using mhdd, but I didn't take any notes, so probably would get a
bunch of stuff wrong if I tried to recollect correctly; plus, I
discovered issues with the test machine's that I used, the 1st one I
think is a MB problem and the 2nd one a cdrom that was causing the MB
to misbehave. However, after getting familar with the program, I do
feel that it does a pretty good job of pointing out a hopeless drive.

On a slightly different subject, when I got curious about the
definition of 'low-level format', I did some googling on the subject
and checked out the Wikipedia for a bit and now I don't know whether I
even did any low-level formatting in the last few days, though I do
know that I used to in the early 80's - oh, well I guess that's
"progress' for ya.

Anyway, of the 3 hard drives that had been trashed by E-machines PSU
failures, the WD 40Gb one is still working fine ( it's in the machine
I'm posting from) so, after scanning it once and not seeing anything
suspect I figure I'll just keep using it unless it starts acting up.
Theres' also a 40 Gb Seagate that used not to be able to pass any of
the mfg's utilities which, after running a few of the operations in
mhdd now passes muster with the mfg's utilities, so I loaded ubuntu
onto it and will start using it sos I can see whether or not it's a
lasting fix. There's also an 80Gb Seagate drive which was not even
addressable by any means, and mhdd was not able to address it either
so I guess it must be totally screwed, forever, no matter what, it's
still just an inert lump...had hopes of making it ert, but so it goes
sometimes...

Thanks for the help,
Mike