I've been trying to recycle some older pc's (Pentium I or
better) as giveaways to middle school students.
Because the machines were often used in offices for 2 years
or so and may contain confidential data after a previous
life of 2-3 years in student labs, I've been running fdisk
to remove all partitions, fdisk /mbr to wipe the mbr, then
setting drive to one large partition and formatting it as
fat16.
Problem is that about 1/2 the drives won't format again;
either format just stops or I get errors indicating that the
drive is bad.  I have not been running scandisk before
starting, but all the machines were working  on a daily
basis prior to my acquisition.
Am I losing the drive data that flags bad sectors by
performing the fdisk /mbr and then failing format because
the drive can't bypass the bad sectors?   Am I doing
something in the wrong sequence?

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