My samsung 40gb (SV4002H) went out, what should I try next? Here's what happened:

1. working ok in XP for years
2. I moved it into a removable tray (bad idea)
3. I walked away for a few hours (it was working ok)
4. when I came back, windows frozen with error, I could hear hard drive trying to read
5. I shut it down, install the drive as a slave in my other XP pc
6. bios sees the drive when I select auto, but it takes about 5 seconds
7. booting to windows- windows starts to boot, but hangs with black screen before desktop apepars, I hear the hard drive attempting to read, it repeats over and over, this is louder then usual, and I know that's not good.
8. I purchase same model, with same FW on ebay, and switch the pcb board from the new one to the bad one- exact symptom, no change

What should I try now? Would spinrite work?

Mike

I'm sure someone will disagree, but I think Spinrite is junk. You don't want to run anything that will change the disk.

Sounds like you'll need a new drive. Image the old one to the new one if possible.

How can I make an image? Drive not seen in XP.

Yep, I agree, IMHO Spinrite will probably kill the drive for good.

Is the HDD recognised properly? (i.e. model and capacity)

If it's recognised properly, make an image with rCopy or Media Tools, some DOS based imaging s/w

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dear , i think ur hdd has bad sector in start area, thats why its getting time to boot, u scan hdd in victoria

I think it is a bad sector too. What do you mean "u scan hdd in victoria"?

Just to make sure that your drive is having problem with "bad sectors"...but if you've done it already, just proceed with cloning.

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Update: still need help. Here's what I managed to accomplish:

1. when booting bios still detects HD with correct size, etc. That's good.

2. I ran the trial version of DiskPatch with the dos boot disk it creates. It saw the drive, and I selected the "support" option, which attempts to read the drive and write a log file. It stalled at "Reading Hard Drive", and finally a message came up "hard drive error", and had to close DiskPatch

Not good. I haven't tried HDClone or similar yet. If DiskPatch can't do basic access, would any other hd dos utility? Any hope for this drive? It still makes same head access sound every 3 seconds or so (louder than usual but not a 'click'). Thanks.

Hi ! Try DiskPatch with reverse cloning method 1

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