Paul wrote:
Jon Danniken wrote:

Thanks Paul, I appreciate it. One other thing I think I read about
is that SE also removes sectors marked as bad, but now I can't find
the page (of course). Fortunately the drive I'm buying only has 90
hours on it, so maybe I'll be fine.

Jon

Yeah, I read that somewhere too, that the spare sectors also get
erased. What that means is, the head will pass over all sectors, and
apply write current. But it doesn't have to verify how the write
turned out. It's not a write-verify kind of operation, more or less a
"best effort", since it's inevitable that some sectors are too
defective to be touched (like, embedded sync is missing as well). If
the embedded sync is demagnetized, then the head won't be able to
actively track position and keep the head over the track. The erase
routine would have to move on to the next location, if that happens.

Paul

I think my concern is that whatever effort the drive has put into
identifying bad sectors is going to be wiped over, re-exposing the bad
sectors as legitimate locations, instead of as marked bad. In other words,
does the record that identifies bad sectors get written over as well?

Jon