HDD reformat after drive failure; reliable?

[sawtoothgrin]

I recently suffered HDD failure and managed to backup all important data from the drive after quite a bit of help from forum members and a few hours of research. Here is a link to said post: http://forums.techguy.org/hardware/856902-solved-hdd-failure-help-recovery.html

My question now is this: Is this drive reliable after suffering the failure that it did? If it were to boot in it's current state, could I trust it or has it's integrity been permanently breached? If I were to reformat said drive, would that fix the bad sectors, errors, or whatever else was wrong with it?

Or should I use this drive as nothing more than a paper weight at this point?

Thanks in advance for any advice

 

[dustyjay]

On a drive that has given you problems like you had, I would run the Manufacturers HDD test software and test the drive thoroughly. Do not just do the Quick Test. DO the full test. If the tests pass then you can use the drive, however I would be leary of putting any mission critical data on this drive. If you do make sure that you have a complete back up of everything on separate media or another drive. Remember Data that you don't have at least 2 back ups of, is data you dont really care about.