This posting is somewhat ironic given my recent “What I learned from HD Tune” posting. Perhaps this is the revenge of the hard drives for making them look bad. The second drive in my study, WD5002AALX, was due for a change since I was changing the system drive for that PC. I pulled it out of the case and started Lifeguard on it, writing zeroes to the entire drive. Almost immediately I saw a dialog with “Sector # xxxxxxx-xxxxxxx write zeroes error! Continue?” I said yes and continued. A few minutes later I saw the same dialog, but with a different sector range. I said yes again and Elapsed Time Remaining increased by about 15 minutes. I allowed it to run for 15 minutes more and saw the same error. This time I said no and looked at the Test Results which stated that the test failed, but SMART still gave a checkmark. I clicked out of that and looked at the list of SMART data and it all looked rosy. Windows was able to perform a complete format with no errors. Since SMART data shows no errors, do I have any options?
I’d try different testing applications to double-check. if it was a false-positive on either side then it’s best confirmed by a second test.
