Miscellaneous > Applications

Hard drive copying software?

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davidnix71:
It's not that one brand is bad or good. It's all batches. Every drive is checked and the really good ones are kept for big corporate customers who don't want mistakes. The not quite perfect stuff is retailed under the makers name and the rest is "white label," which means it passed minimum specs.

If you buy new, demand a long warranty. You'll pay extra, but down time and lost data costs something, too. 3 years is a pretty good warranty.

The reason you have continuing problems with bad sectors may be that they haven't been mapped to the drives' firmware. If you go to Seagate's site there is drive checking software that will append the firmware with an updated list of bad sectors, so it won't matter which OS you run. The protection is then at the hardware level.

Aloone_Jonez:
Thanks for bringing the 3 year warranty to my attention.

Come to think of it, the old hard drive could be still in warranty for all but don't know what I've done with the receipt. :(

IF I find my receipt, do I have grounds to make a claim?

With this drive I'll keep the receipt in a safe place, I'll fold it up and attach it to the inside of the computer's case.

You're right, from what I've read bad sectors should be mostly dealt with at hardware level on modern drives so I need to know how many have really failed, it could be that there are no spare sectors.

davidnix71:
The drives maker knows what the warranty was. Each drive has an embedded serial number. Download the drive maker's integrity checking software and run it. If the drive fails the maker's test it will create a log and you can email the maker for a return authorization.

It probably isn't worth it, though.

Aloone_Jonez:
I've downloaded the tools.

There's a Windows and Linux version but I went for the FreeDOS based book disk in the hope it'll be more immune to potential OS fuck ups.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools/seatooldreg

I'll let you know how it goes.

EDIT:
The scan found 99 errors and bombed out, it said it couldn't fix them because it's a non-Seagate drive. It is annoying that their software doesn't support the older Maxtor products.

I've also discovered that S.M.A.R.T has been disabled has been disabled it, I re-enabled it from the BIOS set up. Now the BIOS gives an error every time the computer is started so I disabled it again because it was annoying.

I certainly didn't change the BIOS setting, for some reason the PC manufacturer decided to disable SMART which was a stupid idea in my opinion.

Aloone_Jonez:
I suppose I've reached a dead end.

I'll just have to wait for the new hard drive to be delivered, then I can copy everything across to it.

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