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Old December 17th 17, 07:47 PM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion,microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Paul[_6_]
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Posts: 41
Default New HDD, has corrupted Data - AGAIN

wrote:

What is the point of cleaning it? It should be blank, and if not, this
is not a secret government operation containing all the codes to launch
the nukes worldwide.... About the only controversial or secret stuff
might be a few pics of cows with their tits showing, and a pic of God
smoking some whacky weed....
Besides that, I've probably re-formatted every partition at least 4
times now, because of these problems. If that didn't clean the drives,
what will....


Keep an open mind.

This is a hardware test.

It tests that the drive is write-able from end to end
and is "data safe" when you put real data on it.

If the size reported by the run, does not conform to
your expectations, you figure out why.

If the test case never finishes, that suggests the
disk has bad patches or something.

You can also set the tests to do reads instead.
This test would stop early, when it encounters even
one CRC error. That would look like...

dd if=\\?\Device\Harddisk2\Partition0 of=NUL bs=221184

What that command would do, is read to the end of Disk2.
And spit out a report of how many chunks it could read.
Multiplying the chunk count by the 221184 number, should
equal the drive size in bytes. On WinXP, you can run
"perfmon.msc" and add a "disk" "write bytes" counter
to the graph, and monitor the transfer rate as the
command runs. A lot of downward spikes indicates a
not very healthy "new" disk.

You can get much the same testing from the WDC or
Seagate test utilities. But I like the added bonus
of *proving* the disk works right up to the end of it.

The Windows "NUL" destination is the equivalent of
/dev/null on Linux and the data goes into the bit bucket.

So these are hardware-guy tests, to be done *before*
you use the disk for real data.

The amount of testing you do, is a function of how
the drive has been abused. Was it in a UPS box with
no Styrofoam peanuts ? Was the drive packaged in a
double plastic "SeaShell" packaging (I picked up
some retail drives from Best Buy packaged that way) ?
If the drive has accepted a rough ride on its way
to see you, then you test it.

The drives I get now, I pick up at the computer store.
They're held in a rack, with no soft packaging at all.
They come in an antistatic bag. There is no way to know
what kind of life they've had in that rack. The company
involved, knows nothing about handling hard drives :-)
Even the sales counter is rock-hard Formica, and they
don't even have a rubber pad to cushion product the sales
associates plunk onto the counter.

The reason I worry about this sort of stuff, is I was
actually sent on a plane trip from work, to root cause
why we had excessive disk failures at a certain site
in the US. When I saw what they were doing, my
jaw dropped :-) And I haven't been the same since :-)
It's not only the UPS driver who has evil in his heart.

Paul