Will formatting fix errors?

My old hard drive (500 gb) recently went through a 30-hour chkdsk function to repair itself. Fortunately, it was able to save its data. I'm now running on a new HD.

My question is: will formatting the old hard drive make it OK again? It would be nice to use it as a secondary drive for media storage, but I don't want to run the risk of losing data. Could all of the trouble been caused by some corrupt files, or could there be something physically wrong with the drive? Will going through the formatting process determine if there's anything physically wrong with it?

Thanks in advance!

 

HD manufacturers have diagnostic software on their websites which should provide you with the answer you need. I would be skeptical about saving anything vital on that drive regardless of test results. 30 hrs. is not good.

 

I've used the manufacturer's diagnostic to do a low-level format on "bad" hard drives and then used them for a couple of years for data storage. They worked fine. (Not applicable for clicking or mechanically damaged drives). A HD that had lots of errors is no good for an OS but for data they can often still be used after doing a low level format.

I wouldn't save my only copy of wedding pictures on one but some music or video files are probably fine for a while.

 

Drives can go bad at any time. If you have anything that you cant afford to loose then you must have a robust backup shedule in place. have a look at Cobian its free and pretty good. As long as the drive is physically OK you can recreate the partition and do a full format. I would maybe suggest use it as a backup repository.

 

I've done this with drives before and wondered why they worked better with data rather than as a system drive... I think it's because OS's, especially Windows, REQUIRE certain parts of the drive to store certain data. As a data drive, the drive can store the data in only good locations.