Time to RMA the drive?

[brakeinup]

I have two Maxtor 250gb SATA drives in my system (not RAIDed). Over the last few days XP has been pausing on boot with the XP logo and progress bar active for anything up to 4 minutes.

It will eventually get into windows and allow normal operation. If I check the System log it reports that an error was detected on hard drive 0.

The system runs fine after it has got in to windows and it does not pause everytime I boot the system.

This looks like a bad sector has been detected. Do the drives self repair (maintenance track) or should I RMA the drive ASAP?

 

[brakeinup]

Thats a good idea! I will image the drive first though.

Can you recommend a low level format tool that would run from windows? I plan to image the drive in my wife's PC and do the format from there.