My problem is with a Fujitsu Siemens Laptop with a TOSHIBA HDD. i have errors on the disk and Windoze setup will only quickformat the drive. it hangs when you format with NTFS. I care not for Data Loss since I have all that on back-up.

So i want to get rid of the bad sectors (PPT 3.5 demo told me there are 3575 bad sectors on the drive and i was at 60% of completed scan then resetted because it took 17 hours to tell me this).

I browsed the web for a lotta tools and none of them solved my problem. The latest tool i used (as a last resort) is

Hard Disk Low Level Format Tool 2.36 build 1181 from http:/hddguru.com

I went to the tab [LOW LEVEL FORMAT] and said format my C drive on my Laptop.

I got the following messages:

5/29/2007 09:25:05 *****W A R N I N G *****
5/29/2007 09:25:05 DURING THE LOW LEVEL FORMAT PROCESS
5/29/2007 09:25:05 ALL DATA WILL BE FULLY and IRREVERSIBLY LOST
5/29/2007 09:25:05
5/29/2007 09:25:05 =================================
5/29/2007 09:25:05 Hard disk low level format Tool 2.36 build 1181
5/29/2007 09:25:05 TOSHIBA MK6025GAS KA200A [60.01Gbytes]
5/29/2007 12:09:25 Format Error occured at offset 35,464,413,184
5/29/2007 12:09:37 Format Error occured at offset 35,464,937,472

The LLF completed at 14:48:00 and then i rebooted.

The laptop now says that the C: drive is BAD. REPLACE and RESUME.

I started the laptop up with my windows CD and it still will not format NTFS (only quick format). Currently i am trying to get Windows XP installed.


Can someone tell me if i made a few wrong turns here and especially tell me if i can resolve the problem i am having short of replacing the drive?

Nope, you have too many bad sectors on the drive to hide.

The reason the laptop is coming up with that message, is that the SMART has kicked in with re-allocated defect count, and the BIOS has picked up the error state.

Could be platter degradation or more commonly spindle failure, on these drives

Either way, bin it.

Thanks PCimage.

I thought as much. SMART keeps on kicking in after every reboot even after setting up windows.

After rebooting, i tried to format the full partition using the NTFS format using XP setup. At 52% it stopped.

Now i tried to partition only 25Gb of the 60Gb and the NTFS format completed. Setup is copying the files and now i hope the system will reboot properly. but i beleive that i have given the HDD a fatal blow with a LLF.



I'll have to replace the drive then. and thanks for the reply PCimage...

Hi you could try to find spinright 6 it will re-set your allocated sector count if it can fix the bads and they are soft bads. But it's a long test and may be a waste of time on a failing drive.

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