[X4U] Disk Utility Stalled? 8x Wipe Taking Forever

[Rick Gordon]

I have an internal SATA drive on my G4 (running through a PCI SATA controller card) that failed the other day with what I am pretty sure was hardware disk errors. I figured I'd try seeing if I could force mapping out of bad blocks before giving up on the drive.

So I reformatted it with Disk Utility (10.3.9), zeroing out all sectors. It was my understanding from web searches, that bad blocks on modern drives will automatically be mapped out by this method, and that there is no true low-level formatting with OS X, and that if the drive were to be low-level formatted, that it could actually damage the functioning of the drive by deleting key low-level information. 

There was no problem with the zeroing reformat. So I figured I'd give it a real work-through and reformat it again with both zeroing all sectors and and an 8x random write. I set it up and went to bed.

Now (the next day) the progress bar is midway through "preparing to write random data to disk", and I haven't seen any bar movement for several hours, although no error is being reported.

Does this sound normal? If not, is there a risk of further damage to the drive if I were to force quit and go back to plan A (zeroing reformat, operating the drive with non-critical data, and seeing how stable its response was)?

Comments, please. Thank you.
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RICK GORDON
EMERALD VALLEY GRAPHICS AND CONSULTING
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WWW:   http://www.shelterpub.com