Maximum PC

Has anyone ever had a false positive on a hard drive test?
A friend brought me his computer that kept giving him BSOD's referencing the hard drive. (which is only about 12 months old)
I downloaded the WD DOS version of Lifeguard and booted to it.
I did a quick test that failed almost instantly and recommended a full scan which I did.
It came up with something to the effect of "Too many errors, please call technical support"
I was able to grab all of his important data off the drive and move it to another drive to get his going until
his replacement came in.
I decided to zero the drive before sending it back and just for giggles re-tested the drive.
NO ERRORS FOUND
What??!!
I tried cloning back the info to the "bad hard drive" and lo and behold everything is working great again with no errors and no BSOD.

Ever heard of a virus doing this?

This was a new hard drive.
Why would he "ditch" it? It is working perfectly now.

I had this happen last week but in reverse. I was getting BSODs with codes referencing the pagefile on my WD C: drive
WD DataLifeguard full scan came up 100% clean.
XP's chkdsk /r found numerous errors and fixed them. It would go real slow to 75% and return to 50%. Three times.

If you are seeing warnings like this:



Then it is a virus. Saw it on my neighbors system a few weeks ago. I used MalwareBytes and ComboFix running MB first to remove the mess. More info can be found here:

viewtopic.php?f=18&t=114366

Additionally a Google of Had Drive Failure Virus will bring up much more information.

Ron

Not the case here Ron but thanks for chiming in.

Could the Master boot record have been tampered with? Sounds like you sorted it out. Btw, does this drive have *smart technology?

Nvm, I'll <wtf> on the manual.

Actually this problem is not due to a virus or anything like that. It's a problem with Win 7 and WD HDDs. and other HDD makers that use a common clone for all the HDD's they make. Since the signatures are the same for each of the HDD's Win 7 corrupts them and renders them useless as far as my experience. I had a brand new WD 320gb HDD and hooked it up to the Win 7 installed PC and "WHOOP" the HDD was rendered useless at least for that pc. I hooked it up to another Win 7 installed pc and same thing only this time it showed up but when tried to use it, it sent up a million I/O read errors. And rendered useless. Hooked it up to an XP installed pc and it said it needed a reformat which I did and used the WD Acronis Program and got the HDD back in perfect working order. Hooked it up to the Win 7 installed pc and "WHOOP" Win7 kicked it in the balls.
I have learned from my researching that it has something to do with the legacy drivers that Microsoft uses in Win7. The legacy drivers that the HDD requires has been changed by Microsoft. So the driver is installed for the HDD but since Microsoft tweaked the hard coding on the driver it causes I/O read errors and renders the drive useless cause of the common OEM signatures on the HDD's. I'm waiting for Microsoft to correct this issue but I'm not holding my breath cuz they have yet to answer my emails about this issue. I usually get a reply email within 8 hours of sending an email but with this issue I have sent almost 20 emails and no reply.

Send them to me...I could use some extra HDs...

lol nice try furball.

You do know when you 0 out a drive it does force a remap? check your smart status and values, you may find your answer there under there, you probably had quite a few bad sectors(normally 15 is the cutoff point for a failed test) if you exceeded that threshhold then there is your answer, most drives have 50 sectors or so reserve specifically for remapping, thats what probably fixed it