Is there hard drive "repair" software that can re-establish a hard drive with partitions?

Is there a hard drive "repair" software package that can totally re-establish a hard drive with partitions, and no longer require data to "factory new status"? I use a lot of Seagate 40GB 7200 RPM ATA/100 drives that occasionally leave the Windows 2000 installation halfway finished. When this happens, there is a partition of 96MB left on the drive that no amount of "fdisk" or "clean drive" will clear. I am looking for a package that the factory may use to final test their drives.
Your best bet in that regard would be a drive-imaging software package, my favorite being Symantec"s Ghost. Ghost will create a bootable CD image of a hard drive that you can restore a workstation to a "known-good" state. To non-destructively manipulate/extend disk partitions on existing workstations, I recommend PowerQuest"s Partition Magic -- relatively inexpensive and (IMHO) quite intuitive.

This was first published in November 2002

Join the conversationComment

Share
Comments

    Results

    Contribute to the conversation

    All fields are required. Comments will appear at the bottom of the article.