Help pls.... is frequent format bad for HDD??

is it possible for a HDD to give up more easily after going through frequent formatting? i have a 20 GB seagate (set as a primary slave to "exel stor" 80 GB) which started crashing very often. I have a feeling that this might be because i formated the drive whenever i had a glitch in operating system or any other problem that won't go away easily. can anyone pls tell me how often can we format a hard drive safely? thank you.

Format itself is harmless theoretically. The problem is that Format couldn't repaired your drive.

Download diagnostic tools from Seagate or its replacement from Maxtor or so.

It must be low-level-formatted if necessary.

As Megumi says, a low level format might help. Here is a low level formatting utility for seagate drives only.
http://www.ameriwebs.net/groupworks...ds/sgatfmt4.zip
And have a look here for info on seagate hdd utils. http://www.seagate.com/support/index.html
Hope that helps

the possibility that the hard drive itself is bad seems quite high actually. i just watched a broken hard drive die, format, return to operation, then only to quickly begin dieing again. Bad sectors, head crashes, etc. can make the HD malfunction. It's also possible that the circuits inside the HD have been damaged too. Computer Equipment isn't as reliable as people think, generally speaking for all circuit board-containing parts, only about 10-30% of the parts produced ever leave the factory. So the likely hood of a small few parts being just barely good enough to make it out the door, but not good enough to run is pretty high. If the above solutions cannot fix it, which will if the drive is ok, toss it or sell it on e-bay (hahaha)

AdamTT

Hey m8,
I do the same thing, format about once every 2-4 weeks, But ive learned not to worry, (exept if ive forgot to back up all of my family files LOL), I'd say its good for your system, Any excuse will do for me, New hardware, to get rid of spyware which anti-virus donsent pick up, The only down to it is installing Service packs, security patches, software, backing up files....etc

No need to worry soo much!

just a hit to you nic and anyone else, but if you can avoid using microsoft's internet explorer, you avoid almost 100% of spyware. I use mozilla (www.mozilla.org) and havn't recieved spyware on my computer in 4 months.

AdamTT

More accurate: If you change IE's security settings you can avoid much spyware. Particularly the ActiveX settings need to be done carefully, so nothing can install itself w/o your knowledge (and watch what you download yourself). I still prefer moz firefox myself for its speed and popup blocking, though the recent exploit shows that no program is impervious.

No....
I said any spyware which my Nortons Internet Security doesnt pick up, which I give about 2 weeks of live updates to find, And it ussually aint that often.

Im just not the kind of person who like to have junk everywhere, It always feels good after a fresh install.