is my hard drive bad?

[wetsawdust]

i have a hard drive without too many hours on it. new in 2004, and has been in storage for a couple years. i can access some of the data on it, but it often gives me I/O errors, and disk utility in mac os 10.5 says it cannot verify/repair the volume. if i reformat, will this disk be reliable? or does this mean the disk is physically bad?

 

[vacunita]

Use the manufacturers Diagnostic Tool to verify it. Sounds like it may have developed some bad sectors.



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Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[Amos43]

I'd format and use chkdsk to scan for bad sectors. If you have problems with either of these tasks, or if the disk starts failing again after you've done these, it means its gone, so you should throw it out.