I have two hard drives (both Seagate 80 GB, coincidentally) that "crashed" in two of my friends' computers. 

The first one would not boot to Windows, so she took it to a shop and the guy just replaced it without really investigating the problem. I actually had to do some data recovery for her, where he did not even try. I was able to slave the drive and get the data with no problems. 

I did a scan using SeaTools and found just two errors (bad sectors, if I recall correctly). I repaired them and am now using this drive in an external CASE for backup STORAGE.

The second crashed in a similar fashion, but rather than just replace the HDD, the owner decided to buy a new system.(?!?!)  They hobbled along on a repair installation of XP for a few months, then went out and bought a Vista machine.

After scanning this HDD with SeaTools, MANY (100+) errors were found. I again was able fix them, FILLED the drive with ZEROES, and now the scan comes back OK.

Here is my question:  Can both of these drives be trusted?  I figured the first one would be OK, as there were only two problems. I thought it would make a good backup drive.  You think?

What about the second one?  Should I just trash it?

Thanks,

PaulIn my experience, even tho the drives have been "repaired" by any disk utility, I don't trust them.  If they have failed once then they will surely fail again, as will ALL hard drives.  It's just a matter of time.

Just so happens that these folks had a FRIEND like you to get their data back.

Alan <><