I have a WD1600BB 160GB drive with problems. The drive is detected by the BIOS, I can read and write to the drive, MHDD does not show errors when scanning. However it is slow like hell and every few seconds the drive heads knock. Sometimes it's a few knocks within one second, sometimes there are no knocks for more than 30 seconds. Even if I don't access the drive it still knocks once in a while. Anyone has an idea what could it be. Corrupted firmware, defective drive heads? Thanks in advance for all answers.

I would doublecheck all connections…

But these drives are usually dying the same way you described…

Thanks for your answer. Connections are fine. I actually tested the drive with abnother ATA133 cable and it behaves the same way. Yes, looks like the drive is dying . BTW, MHDD is a great program Dmitry. I've been using it since version 2.9 which I still prefer over the new 4.0.

Try to use newest snapshots (4.1.9) — it has no activation, has SCSI support, ATA terminal
You can get snapshots here: http://hddfiles.zirochka.com/
(just place the .exe over your 2.9 file)

Docs will come with release, so for now F1 should work enough.

Thanks, I'll check it right away. BTW my Antivir is blocking access to files hfr2.0setup.exe and hsr2.0setup.exe from this archive saying that it's "the Trojan horse TR/Spy.KStaff". Any idea why is that happening...

Just checked with symantec. Nothing found.

Looks like the german Antivir personal edition is giving false alarms though . That's what I'm using : http://www.free-av.com/.