More Hard Drive Issues

So recently my Hard Drive decided to go into retard mode. One day it decided to go from working well to showing up as "local disk" and being inaccessable. That didn't turn out to be much of a problem as I was able to copy the data off of the HD onto another via GetDataBack.

From there I figure I'd just format the HD and start from scratch, and that's where my issues lay. So I found a program that enabled me to zero fill the HD. From there I put in my XP disk to try and create a partition and format the HD in NTFS format. I was able to create the partition just fine, but I wasn't able to reformat it... so I figure fine I'll try it in windows maybe that'll make a difference. Well just STARTING Windows was an adventure and it wasn't able to do anything in terms of formatting it (also tried in Safe Mode).

I do believe there may be some bad sectors on the disk, but this is where I'm stuck. I'm at my wits end and am tempted to just chuck the motherfucker, but I figured I'd ask for suggestions here first.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I wouldn't try any "rescue missions", just get yourself another harddrive.

Bad sectors are deallocated by the harddrive logic itself, so you seem to have a lot more problems than just "bad sectors".

EDIT: To be more precise. Every drive has a pool of spare sectors that replace sectors that become "nearly" unreadable. The hardware logic can detect when a sector is in process of becoming bad. It then copies then data from the dying sector the the spare one, disables the old one, and then links the now filled spare sector to the adress of the old one. This is completly transparent for anything outside the harddrive. You don't have any influence about this.
The only thing that you can do is query if that kind of action happened in the past. That's what SMART is for, it also supplies a log of actions taken by the harddrive. It collects information about various things, etc.

So this means your drive has already depleted all spare sectors (IF the problem is really bad sectors, maybe also the servo is bad, or another issue - there are a bunch of them). So you see that sectors are dying in your drive. And most likely this process won't simply stop. And you're left with no spare sectors..... The next time a sector dies, the data is gone, it's not duplicated anywhere.

So get a new drive fast.

How ya doing, buddy?

Yeah after I made that post I did some reading and I guess you're right. I really thought I could salvage the thing. It was a bit shocking though because it went from flawless to life support after one errant restart, so I thought it would be salvageable. I guess I'm lucky I was able to manage what i did. I'm not dying for space though as I've still got 700GB free.

I also went to Newegg and looked up my customer history. The drive is over 5 years old (!), so I guess I should be proud as it served me well until just recently. I simply didn't realize I had it so long. I'd give it a hero's burial, but I think just throwing it in the trash will be just as good.

Thanks though.

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