Unable to format

[JGO]

Hello everybody,
I'm having problems with a hard drive that has a lot of bad sectors and when I try to format it takes hours and there is no advance in the formating, it stays trying to recover several allocations, but my friend (the owner) already spend 36 hours waiting to see if the format process ends by itself but the most the process advance is 32% in those 36 hours, I remember with the old hard drives you can give them a low level format and sometimes this could fix the problem, but I don't know if with newer hard drives this is possible. The hard drive is a samsung SV2001H, and I was searching on the website but there are no utilities to fix the problem, is there some utility I can use to format the HD at low level? or do I recommend my friend to get a new HD?
Thank you in advance for any help you can provide.

[BigBlue66]

They call it Zero Fill nowadays, which I think does basically the same thing as a low level format. If you can't find any utility to provide that, then it's time for a new harddrive.

It's probably time for a new harddrive anyway, since a zero fill would likely take a week to accomplish and then there is no guarantee that the harddrive will be useable. Once a drive develops lots of bad sectors, it's usually time for either an RMA if a warranty is still available, or just purchase a new one.

[mjc]

Or spend several thousand dollars on a fancy piece of equipment to really LL format it and remap the bad sectors out. There are a few places around that will do this to recondition drives, but often charge as much of more than a brand new one....the machine does do a few other things too, like allow bit by bit copying of the drive to recover lost data.

But for the most part...this drive has seen better days and should be replaced.

[Sylvander]

Go here http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/utilities/index.htm
to download a free copy of the Samsung version of [Ontrack's] Disk Manager which is made available only to owners of Samsung HDD's.

This is capable of doing lots of useful things including:
1. Writing zero's to the drive.
2. Re-partitioning.
3. Re-formatting.
4. Checking that your drive is in good working order.

Once you get the hang of the software it's incredibly easy to use.
When you re-partition it will re-format too at the same time without any intervention [if you give it the ok].

Unless they have dramatically changed what the software does since I got my copy.

Here's the Ontrack site where they charge for it.
http://www.ontrack.com/diskmanager/
Look at the price!