I just salvaged a 160Gb HDD

aquageek

Sweeeeet.

So a few years back I was having trouble with a new system, so I started to reinstall the HDD, something happened and the install got interrupted and I could never recover the disk. I took it back to the store and they checked it out, declared the HDD as defective and put a new one in and also gave me the defective one back.

At the time I tried to recover it but formatting would get jammed at 4% from command line, and chkdsk would never complete. I looked on seagate's website for a low level format but what they had at the time didn't work. So I put it on the shelf and gave it up.

Came across it the other day and decided to try it out again. Same thing happened with the format and chkdsk so I searched for a low level format tool, and found one - performed a LLF while I went to a meeting, came back and it had finished. Left it doing a chkdsk overnight and came back without any error messages. Initialized the disk and it's healthy.

Had to share my joy!

tiersten

You can't low level format a modern hard disk. It just isn't possible with the built in controllers that are present. What the utility you've used did is that it kept retrying until the defect mapping mechanism in the HD electronics decided to kick in.