Hard Drive format

I am assisting a friend with adding a 10 gb drive to his Emachine. This is a used drive he purchased from Human Computer and it is the third one , as the other two were trash. With that in mind, I decided to do some testing before going any further. The tech at Human said it was already formatted and that he had fully testerd it. A simple scandisk ran ok, but surface scan started to have problems early on, reads taking longer than normal. Next, I fired up MaxiBlast and checked the drive info.

Defaults s/b: 19841 cyl/16 hds/63 sect/10240 mb,
actual values are: 16383 cyl/16 hds/ 63 sect/8455 mb.

Diags would not run, FAT errors or ran out of memory trying to read sector info.
I am assuming this came out of a system that could only recognize 8.4 gb drives and was set up in Bios as the same and formatted. Fdisk shows it to be 9728 mb.
I am not sure at this point what I want to do first and would appreciate your suggestions. I would hate to change much and have the Human Computer people blame it on me. Tried real hard to get friend to purchase a new drive, but He's brainwashed by these people. He paid 60 bucks for the thing and could have got a new 40 gb for 85-90. Thanks in advance.

 

Using the AutoDetect option in the BIOS should give you the real story on the drive specs. Not sure why your utility is reporting the wrong number of cylinders - even if the drive had a massive number of bad sectors I don't think it would do that.
I would try to get your hands on a copy of Spinrite - it's the best disk integrity check/repair program available. It can easily be found with a search engine.

FGS, you can a Seagate Barracuda IV 20GB 7200rpm drive for $75 new. Your friend sounds like he's into the penny-wise, pound-foolish thing.