Send them back, do not buy from seller again. Reallocated sectors are like coughing blood. It never happens for a good reason.

yeah, return them Testing was likely nothing more than trying to power them.

The Warning about reallocated sectors means IIRC that the count is over the SMART threshold. While it does not necessarily mean much, I would definitely not trust any HDD with SMART warnings.

1 of them shows as "good", but when I try to format it in Minitool Partition Wizard, I get a "bad disk" error and it won't format.

I could be wrong, but such warning messaages are a bad sign nowadays. Newer IDE hard disks (~ mid-90s+) tended to mask any "bad sectors",
i.e. tried to fix them discretely in behind. This is contrary to the old DOS times, where "bad sectors" were not uncommon and occured
from time to time. Back then, DOS -or rather FORMAT- would just mark them as "bad" and go on..

Mister Xiado wrote:

Send them back, do not buy from seller again. Reallocated sectors are like coughing blood. It never happens for a good reason.

I had a WD SATA disk that developed a single reallocated sector and spect 5 years or more without failing (it didn't even get another reallocated sector) until I sold it. A single (or few) reallocated sectors may indicate a single event in the past, but if you see a big number of them or (worst) that the count is incresing, that disk is not realiable anymore.

Last week, I put a thread asking for Windows x64 testing tools. Besides using WinDFT with my USB adapter (I guess that it only works with HGST disks, but I haven't tested with other brands) to run SMART tests, I needed some "readability" (is it written right?) tests... MHDD and Victoria reads every sector and time it, so you can see if reading a block is longer than usual (indicating a reallocation candidate). I consider unreliable disks that shows a number "orange/red" blocks (when you use Victoria or MHDD you'll know what I'm talking about)... it will probably fail soon.

About online tests: while SMART tests are fairly immune to external disturbances (unless you read/write to the same disk that you are analyzing), running those "readabilty" tests in are influenced by CPU load... a orange/red block may indicate also that your CPU load is high or that the I/O operation is lagged because you're trying to play games while doing tests.

(BTW, Victoria 4.68b supports SMART on more USB adaptors so you can read SMART parameters and launch some internal tests)

Mister Xiado is right: dump all those disks.

Koltoroc wrote:

yeah, return them Testing was likely nothing more than trying to power them.

I don't think the seller even powered them.

tegrady wrote:

1 of them shows as "good", but when I try to format it in Minitool Partition Wizard, I get a "bad disk" error and it won't format.

Under DOS, usually "bad disk" means that track 0 is damaged. A disk with a single damaged sector in track 0 won't format even if the rest of the disk is fine.

Thanks! I'm going to ask for the full refund.

Refund is an obvious way to go, but if you'll end up keeping them you can try to fix them by cleaning the contact pads underneath the board.
Unscrew the PCB (only PCB!) and gently clean the pads that touches the drive head contacts using alcohol and soft pencil eraser. Then use erase and scan options in MHDD software.
Works for most drives, except for IBM and Hitachi - they have different contacts, that require good soldering skills to fix them.