06-15-2004, 02:37 AM
Not necessarily a format problem. If the heads get damaged or worn, it's done. If the MBR (master boot record) gets messed up, you could lose everything on the hard drive without the data even being touched. That's possible to recover from.
From all the laptop repairs I do at school, I can tell you that heat kills hard drives. That and just pure bad luck (I've seen the repair history of one person who had 5 dead hard drives over the 4 years and 2 laptops he was here). Personally I've never had a problem, and out of my friends only one had a hard drive that started failing, but was still functional (just unstable). That was at the end of the system's lease anyway. The sucky part is that you can't blame it on a specific vendor, because Dell gets its hard drives from everyone.
From all the laptop repairs I do at school, I can tell you that heat kills hard drives. That and just pure bad luck (I've seen the repair history of one person who had 5 dead hard drives over the 4 years and 2 laptops he was here). Personally I've never had a problem, and out of my friends only one had a hard drive that started failing, but was still functional (just unstable). That was at the end of the system's lease anyway. The sucky part is that you can't blame it on a specific vendor, because Dell gets its hard drives from everyone.
Trade yourself in for the perfect one. No one needs to know that you feel you've been ruined!