Hello

I've searched a few keywords and did not find direct answers, hence posting here for support.

The HD on my Laptop froze one evening, and would not respond to any input. Cyling power was the only option, and henceforth, would not boot. It was suggested (by another) that the HD had permanently failed, and data recovery would be impossible.

After flipping off the ignorant, I purchased a new laptop HD so I could at least use the laptop again, and research methods of recovery. Along came Knoppix! I was able to recover all my data files from the supposed "permanently failed" HD and life is now good.

Now, I have a new HD that is chugging along, and the "original" HD, which I'm not convinced is "permanently failed". The drive itself is only 13 months old, and has not be subjected to frequent shocks/vibrations/temp variations; it's led an easy HD life in a laptop. I'm thinking if i were able to recover data from the supposed "dead" drive, then perhaps it's really not dead, but some critical files got corrupted, and hence will not boot. It "seems" to access, spin, read/write, and do all the "normal" activities of a HD.

At this point, I would like to reformat it as if it were a new drive coming from a factory, such that it could be used as an external backup HD via USB. So, it would need to be able to blow away the existing partitions, and reformat it to NTFS.
Can this be done via Knoppix? It seems to be the only envirnoment which can read/write/access the flaky HD?

Your help on this matter would be appreciated.