Repairing hard drive errors

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,

Paul

 

I imagine they'll be fine. Especially for backup drives. Trust your gut though not just my opinion.

Hope this helps!
Cool, my name is Paul too!