Hello. I have an interesting question. I have two Seagate 1.5tb hard drives in my drobo at the moment, and will soon add a third. The problem is I did not check the firmware of the two drives before putting them into the drobo to make sure they weren’t the bad version that came out a year ago. Also, I did not run a usual Spinrite check on them before installation.
My question is can I place the two drives I have now into a Windows machine and do any regular maintenance on them? What are the consequences if I load up a Windows OS on them? Would it damage the file system, or would they be unrecognizable in Windows? After finishing, could I place them back into the drobo unharmed?
Would it really show up as unallocated disk space, or just an unknown partition? In either case, it doesn’t sound like I could write to the drive from Windows or any other OS. I suppose Spinrite itself would be fine, because it looks at the raw bytes on the sectors and doesn’t care about file systems.