On 9 October 2013 08:40, Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk wrote:
Good thought, I have UBCD kicking around but didn't think about using it to test the disks.
So far I have tried every tool under the sun (it seems), without getting anywhere. The WD tools just refuse to test the disks ("missing test tracks", error 0229, that nobody seems to have a solution for but isn't the fault of the disks). Even DBAN crashed whenever I tried to wipe the disks, but I have solved that one (booting from a USB drive seems to confuse it, and you have to pull the drive out at the "detecting USB devices" (or similar) stage of the boot process). I wonder now whether something similar might fix the WD diagnostics problems (I'm about 0.05% into a quick wipe at the moment so I've got 10~ hours before I can do much else with them).
When did hard disks get so complicated?