[chadsdsmith]

I have a 4tb Seagate Hard Drive that had a number of Iso files (Blu Ray Iso's to be exact) become unreadable. They never disappeared from the file folder, they just would not play. No Iso (Iso buster etc) recovery software was able to recover them. Not all of the Iso's were lost, maybe 1/3 of them. Anyways, I tested the hard drive via sea tools and it passed all the tests without a hitch. Is it ok to format and reuse this hard drive? It is not showing any other signs of problems and is not all that old? Thanks

 

[TornadoTJ]

Do a full format, not a quick format. You might download an eval copy of Stablebit Scanner to run against it after that just to make sure.

 

[ajkrishock]

I have a 4tb Seagate Hard Drive that had a number of Iso files (Blu Ray Iso's to be exact) become unreadable. They never disappeared from the file folder, they just would not play. No Iso (Iso buster etc) recovery software was able to recover them. Not all of the Iso's were lost, maybe 1/3 of them. Anyways, I tested the hard drive via sea tools and it passed all the tests without a hitch. Is it ok to format and reuse this hard drive? It is not showing any other signs of problems and is not all that old? Thanks

My hard drive tool of choice has always been spinrite. Steve Gibson knows his stuff. I run spinrite on all newly purchased drives and on anything I suspect isn't 100% healthy. Highly recommended.

 

[TornadoTJ]

Last I heard, Spinrite won't work on drives over 2TB.

 

[ajkrishock]

Last I heard, Spinrite won't work on drives over 2TB.

I don't own a drive larger than 2 Tb, so that's possible, I guess. It would make sense that there would be a limit of some kind, but I couldn't find mention of it on Steve's page.

 

[John Sully]

You might just have filesystem corruption rather than a bad drive. You do have backups, don't you?

 

[TornadoTJ]

I've been using Spinrite since I had a 10MB MFM Rodime drive. When we started getting the 30MB RLL Seagates and the 40MB... darnit, starts with an M... we started having trouble with those drives. Also I installed a 1:1 interleave Western Digital controller in my PC and wanted to change the interleave from 3:1 to 1:1 to take advantage of the speed. Spinrite could re-low level format those drives in place, was a real time saver.

Anyway, I believe the reason for the limitation is due to the fact he's using FreeDOS to boot and run the tools. I've been meaning to confirm this limitation, but never have. I haven't upgraded in forever, and talked to them about upgrade but they could not find me. But when I "heard" (not confirmed" this limitation, it made sense to me and I keep forgetting to email them. If you email them and find out, let me know.

 

[chadsdsmith]

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I am just going to run with this drive. It passed all the tests and formatted fine. Could I have had a filesystem corruption that caused the iso's to crap out without it being a problem with the drive itself?

 

[Krispy Kritter]

Could be any number of possible causes aside from just a HDD issue. So yes, it's possible.