Advise on low level formatting

Hey All,

I’ve got an external WD passport drive (500GB) which detects & copies DATA pretty much slowly. Well, I bought this from a friend & he said to do a low level formatting. It got searched till 17xxxxxxx (out of 97xxxxxxx)… 

Well, I’ve tried that & at some point it ask me to click “yes” or “no” on writing zero values on some sectors contiuously. I can’t keep on clickin them by looking at the computer… do you all have any idea whether " Acronis" will do this without prompting me to click on each sector to write values, even if it’s a bad sector?? :frowning:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1211/~/how-to-low-level-format-or-write-zeros-(full-erase)-to-a-wd-hard-drive-or-solid

Please help me on this 

Rather than using other software you may run an Extended Test to the drive, using DLG.  This will detect if there are bad sectors in the drive, if this is the case it would need to be replaced.

How to test a drive for problems using Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for Windows 

I think DLG will also write zeroes to the drive. Sometimes  that solves problems.

Joe

Absolutely! I had a disk that was exposed to bad power conditions, brownouts and similarly contaminated power. Almost immediately thereafter the disk seemed to experience random disconnects from the USB port when performing some read operations, slow access to many files and all that good stuff that goes with failing hardware.

I zero’ed the disk, ran HDD regenerator, and did a standard long format. And the disk has be fine since, 2 years running.