My Hitachi DK23BA-20 drive has so many problems that the SMART status is set to 'bad'. Yes, I know the drive is bad, but I am trying to fix it, or at least put a dummy non-DOS partition over the first 25% of the sectors so that I can use the rest.

Question... can the SMART drive status be reset from 'bad' to 'good'?

Thank you.

Has a theory that say that you can "FIX" some of S.M.A.R.T problems, not all them.
You know that S.M.A.R.T. is a set of features that are analysed during the POST and when something is very bad the system just stops.
But to fix the S.M.A.R.T. you will need a software / hardware that can handle your hard disk.
I think that you can start with Drive Fitness from Hitachi and I also think that if Global (HST) can not help you, the other option that you will have is PC3000 PCI version or you can wait for Salvation Data they say that they will have an utility that will work with IBM/Hitachi harddisks.
You can try PC3000 ISA vesion to see what is the S.M.A.R.T. feature that is "bad" using the PC3000AT.exe ( Universal Utility ), but it can not fix the problem.
You also can try to do something using the HRT universal utility from BVG group, this utility is Freeware and you can find it at the BVG website.
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