Low-level format to fix a damaged drive?

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William Langton

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Mar 20, 2013
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I have a bunch of damaged Seagate disks. Most are 1TB 3.5" drives removed from GoFlex external packaging, but one is a 500MB 2.5" (also GoFlex). Unfortunately, these drives might have been treated roughly and failed as a result. The data on them is apparently not recoverable, which is a major problem for me but is not the reason for my query. I just want to restore the disks to usable condition since I invested non-flexible $$ on the GoFlex line. My assumption is that the heads have been knocked out of alignment with the preformatted tracks on the platters and that the only way to restore proper alignment is to low-level format the drives in order to recalibrate the physical relationship between heads and platters. Am I right about this, and if so, what software is best to perform the low level formatting?
 
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Because the poster is assuming the entire face of the platter is magnetic,and re formatting them will re initiate usability.Cheeses. its not rocket science, is it? He has clearly stated that the suspected damage is merely the heads now being out of line with the existing tracks.
Storage badge my water butt. Will, the only likely way these could all be damaged in this way the same is if they were ALL in an external drive housing that got dropped. Any time I have seen a successful recovery on the cheap is by slaving drives onto a linux machine and scanning the sectors. I have seen this done with noisy broken drives that wouldnt even boot windows. In the case of several the same, you could find one matching drive and swap all the plates...
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chrisso

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Nov 17, 2013
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Because the poster is assuming the entire face of the platter is magnetic,and re formatting them will re initiate usability.Cheeses. its not rocket science, is it? He has clearly stated that the suspected damage is merely the heads now being out of line with the existing tracks.
Storage badge my water butt. Will, the only likely way these could all be damaged in this way the same is if they were ALL in an external drive housing that got dropped. Any time I have seen a successful recovery on the cheap is by slaving drives onto a linux machine and scanning the sectors. I have seen this done with noisy broken drives that wouldnt even boot windows. In the case of several the same, you could find one matching drive and swap all the plates out. several times..You could try stripping one and see if you can bend the pickups in line with the lines on the disks.
(This would probably be to the same degree on each platter in each drive)Or, you could just try to get them going again. Go for it one way or another, yr a long time dead and they are landfill if you do nothing. Good luck!

 
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