Windows 10: Can I do a low-level format to rescue this drive? - my BAD

I'm posting this thread about a Hitachi 7200 RPM 4 TB drive that now sells for about $125 on Newegg. The drive is now unusable due to user stupidity (me). *Busted I'm wondering if there is any way to do a low-level format such that all the file corruption caused by me can be repaired.

A few days ago, I posted a thread in this forum (How) Can I repair this drive?, about a disk that got so messed up that chkdsk could not fix it. I'm starting a new thread because I made the original problem much, much worse.

To recap, there was a power failure in the middle of a complex operation involving a large file. After rebooting, I ran chkdsk and got this result:





Then I made the situation much worse by rerunning the same complex operation involving a file on the same drive. Each time, the application basically froze the entire system to where I had to do a reboot. I did that twice, and probably created a lot of additional disk corruption. MY BAD. *Redcarded Let me repeat. MY BAD. *Banghead.

I was able to salvage some files from the disk by copying them off to another drive, and then deleting them to clear disk space, but I still could not get chkdsk to fix the drive. So I reformatted the drive because maybe with a fresh format chkdsk might work. A quick format went fine. A non-quick format stalled at about 66% and stayed stuck at 66% overnight.

So I ran chkdsk again, this time with the /r option, to locate bad sectors and recover readable information. After 4 hours, was 19% complete. 11 hours later, progress went from 19% to only 25% and ETA was 44:05.

So I stopped that chdsk, and reran it, this time with /i and /c options to perform a less vigorous check of index entries, and skip checking of cycles within the folder structure. After 10 minutes, 2% complete and ETA 7:06. Good. But after 6 hours of checking, it was only 15% complete, and ETA was 33:30. Time to quit.

So this drive is hosed, or is it? I'm sure that all this corruption is bad sector data, corrupted sector headers and trailers, that was caused by the initial power failure and then me rebooting the system in the middle of a file operation. Is there any way to reformat the drive and fix all this corruption?

I've owned over 10 of these 7200 RPM Hitachi drives over the years, and I have had exactly zero problems with any of them after years of operation. This drive now lists for about $125 on Newegg, so I still want to get it working again.

:)

 

Low Level Format Question

Low level format is basically setting all and any bit of information on the plates to 0. There should not be problems with IDE drives, but I've never try it on one so I can't be sure. Most of the manufacturers provide some software witch you can use to low level format their HDDs and will have a list of supported drives. I think that running low level format for 2-3 times will be more than sufficient.

 

Low Level Format Question

depends, low level formatting for a time did cause issues, there are horrory stories after the 1gb barrier of people low level formating and there drive not reading right anymore, though id image those days are gone

 

HDD low level format and bad sector fix tool

I am looking for HDD low level format and bad sector fix tool.

I got a 160GB Seagate SATA I drive from my friend who said it stopped working after giving errors. I put in my test machine and my machine recognised it. So formatted it once again (he already formatted it couple of times). Copied some files and it copied fine. Now when I open it the files cannot be opened. So I thought something serious with the drive and I ran HDTune Pro's HDD analysis (trial version). It found 4 small blocks of bad sectors at the beginning of the drive and rest are fine.

So I am thinking of a low level DOS format tool that will mark these as bad sectors and format the rest.

Also tried Seatools, didn't fix it.

Not sure if its still under warranty.

Please help.