[ale] OT: Erasing a toasted drive

[Geoffrey]

Warren Myers wrote:
> You could schedule an MRI and take it with you :)
> 
> How crashed is the drive? I've found that I've sometimes been able to load a
> drive using a live CD and reformat it, at least partially.

reformatting it is not going to remove much of anything on the drive. 
Granted, it's unlikely anyone at Dell is going to do much more then 
attempt to boot the thing, but you just don't know where that drive will 
go.  In reality, overwriting the drive a number of times is the 
solution, but likely not available for this door stop.

I would try to boot from a cd and attempt to fdisk, reformat and then 
rewrite the drive.  If it's totally toast, no luck, but if you can fdisk 
the drive and start writing stuff to it, leave it over night and see how 
far it goes.  Do the bad block check when you format it.  That could 
well take over night or longer.  All depends on how paranoid you are.

If it was me, I'd likely replace the drive with a similar one, as long 
as it didn't void the warranty.  Seriously, it depends on the data 
that's on there, but you don't want anyone getting your source. Problem 
is, that might void the warranty, thus you're stuck with simply trying 
to write to the drive.

Is the warranty void if you replace the drive yourself?  If not, tell 
them the other drive went bad and find you another bad drive to stick in 
there.  I've got a 20gig laptop drive that's toast, I'll send it to you 
if you want to go that route.  Seriously, let me know.

> First, find a whopping-big magnet ...

This is likely a better solution then a simple format.



-- 
Until later, Geoffrey