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Back when I worked in a shop I had a guy bring in a tower with a CD writer who swore it would only read damaged discs and wanted it fixed. I couldn’t get anything to go wrong and told him so after a few days. That every disc we had in the store worked. (None were brand new). He came in with a new sealed CD album (Rush if I remember right), opened it in front of me and sure enough it would spin for a bit and eject as a bad disc. He said he could make it work by damaging the disc. I said no way and bet a new drive on it. He literally scratched the disc with a pen cap and popped it in and it fn played. He got a brand new DVD rom for that demo.

I learned that day to never dismiss a tech issue at face value.

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Let me follow on (at the urging of another user).
As the late, great, greatnesses, Paul Harvey had said: here is...the rest of the story.
I found out some time later that the issue was an early copy protection. A multi track disc. The old CD player was confused because it could read the data, and translate it, but got no error messages from the disruptive fake TOC. Where a more modern drive of the era was designed to stop after a faulty toc the earlier drive the customer had didn’t have the firmware to deal with it. It saw the toc and then kept scanning and figured out the data didn’t match the toc.
By damaging the disc, the drive ignored the first toc and pulling the second, real, one from the sub channel.

That issue did become a bit of hacking lore in the late 90s. People flashed back dated firmware to newer otherwise identical drives. Some even cross flashed; turning ab into drive yz.
Such a strange time it was. It was 1988 all over again substituting cds for floppy’s!

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One thing that I always do with any hard drives I find is that I run a disk wipe utility on them. I have so many drives so I ended up taking a scrap PC that has both IDE and SATA ports on it and set it up as a dedicated workstation for wiping drives. There's a free wipe utility out there called DBAN (Darik's Boot And Nuke). I would run it on your drive and as it's wiping the drive, if there are errors on the disk, they will be reported. If a drive finishes with errors, best thing you can do with it is take it apart for scrap metal and the controller board. I believe lostinlodos has a post here on taking one apart and degaussing it with the magnets you find inside. My personal preference is taking the cover off, then poking two holes through the platters using a 3/8" or 5/16" drill bit.

If you are planning on reusing drives, there's another free utility called CrystalDiskInfo. It will read all the SMART data off a hard drive and if any of the information is outside normal expected limits, CrystalDiskInfo will highlight it. Anything that is not flagged unusual and is above 160GB, I would keep. The rest go as scrap.

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kgryczan
Forum Moderator

Great ideas:
crystal

dBan
Don’t use DBAN for flash/SSD drives though. It believes the controller and will skip quite a few blocks.
For flash you’ll need something along the lines of a controller based partitioner. Such as the one in the gparted above. Just make an encrypted flash-targeted partition like FFS or EXT4 with the -se switch, secure erase option. Then reformat to a normal partitions.
Secure erase will flip every bit twice and drop charge the individual cells. It also obeys the controller log so it won’t mess up wear levelling.

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