I have found that hard disk diagnostics tools on a bootable floppy disk has been a life saver for me. I just had a Maxtor 60 gig that came back to life after using the Maxblast bootable cd to zero fill the drive. All of a sudden I could format and install an OS on it after I had already replaced it with a new 80 gig for the customer. I thought the firmware on the hdd controller had gone bad. The customer allowed me to keep the drive so now it has a home in an old Dell.