I wish I could see into the drive when it was clicking to see what exactly was happening, whether it was seek issue, or the head arm was just stuck (and not even entering the disk). It should have been functional before shipping. And also, I let it warm up for an hour, but there was some condensation after bringing it in on it, and I don’t know how it was doing inside, though I think it should have been okay after that much time on table.

Anyway, as for the problematic disk, Iomegaware’s full format manages to take care of it, but it’s far slower than writing the whole disk.

Long Format performs a complete surface verify on the disk as it is formatted. This option should be used for all disks that have developed read/write errors.

It also shows disk and “formatting” life percentage, whatever those actually mean. I couldn’t get Trouble in Paradise to work in either Windows XP or 2000, though I didn’t try on bare metal.