Thread: Disk cleanup

I have Maxtor SATA drives scavanged from my Dell PC.
I wonder what I should/can do to be sure they are in top shape. I know one has a bad superblock and the other may have a time related problem.
I've been told running badblocks on modern drives is of no value as spare blocks automatically replace bad blocks as found. True/False ?

I wonder what I should do and the order:
a) Should I wipe disk clean (isn't partitioning + formatting the same)?
b) Should I leave/remove the partitions I created and fsck the drive (does it needed partitions)?
c) Would running "testdisk" (Parted Magic) be useful?
d) The superblock needs to be repaired. Is that done by "fsck-ing" or some other way?

ya u can do that but u need to b very carefull while cleanninmg up the disk so be concious and ask fr a better expert.

What I did was turned on SMART in the BIOS and ran it on one suspect disk to get an output which told me the disk was clean and green, well figuratively anyway.
I will try this later on the one with a reported bad block.