Hard Drive Formatting question

[Mudpie48]

Hi I am one of those people trying to keep Hard Drives out of the local landfill. A large number of the drives I see are formatted into two sections. One section is usually fairly small 20-100MB and the other section is the rest of +- 99% of the rest of the drive. Am I making a mistake by formating the whole drive as opposed to just formatting the larger portion of the drive or should I just go ahead and format the whole drive? I use these drives to build computers that I have that have no drives or else I sell them online. I hope this isn't a stupid question. Guilty as charged. I am just starting in this adventure. I use Hard Disk Sentinel, my computer management tool in W7 and I have quite a few other software programs that I have so far just played with. I am trying to build a computer specifically for this purpose with multiple drive bays both ide and sata and with ubuntu as the OS so as to be able to check out more drives at a time rather than one at a time. I actually have some of what I think are scsi drives from a server that I would like to test but that is a project for another day. Thanks for any information that you might be able to supply. And yes some day I would like to afford the real tools I think most of you use like the Atola Disc Recycler but that is way in the future.

[fzabkar]

I would zero-fill the whole drive and then perform a full surface scan with a tool such as MHDD. MHDD will identify any "slow" sectors. Finally, examine the SMART report with MHDD, CrystalDiskInfo or Hard Disk Sentinel, etc.

[Mudpie48]

Thank you one and all. It looks like a fairly long and steep learning curve but I think I will give this a try. Is there an online web site that will give me a place to start my journey. I have retired from a long and happy career in an ancillary medical field and I guess my brain would like another challenge. I have no illusions of ever truly understanding computers in general and hard drives (storage devices) in particular but I would like to at least try. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.