Hey,

I just upgraded my cousin's PC which still used IDE and i told him he needed to get a Sata HD or SSD and he said he had an external hard drive which i could scrap the HD to use in the system, he ended up buying a new one because the HD was damaged so now i ended up with a 500Gb HD that i want to experiment before i throw in the trashm, i thought this could be a good time to learn more about hard drives. It had the cc44 firmware, i upgraded to the most recent.

Facts:

When i opened the external drive case it had a screw running inside (Short circuit?)
It doesn't make any weird sounds, actually it sounds like its new
It shows on windows as a RAW FS (probably because i tried to format and it failed)
Get the S.M.A.R.T bad backup replace warning when i turn on the PC
The moment i try to format it disconnects after a few sectors, like if i pull the plug ( i believe it doesnt even gets to 1%)

this are the only attributes that show problems.

Num| Attribute | Value | Worst | Raw(hex) | Threshold
005 | Reallocation Sector Count | 010 | 010 | 0000000000-0E6A | 036
197 | Current Pending Errors Count | 092 | 092 | 0000000000-015A | 000
198 | Uncorrectable Errors Count | 092 | 092 | 0000000000-015A | 000

I've been trying several tools to zero fill but the disk always disconnects. Any hint?

Are you performing this zero fill with the drive connected via SATA or USB?

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Via SATA, what happens before it writes the zeros? It reads all the sectors? The first x sectors or starts writing right from the start?

SATA is good.
It begins writing 00s from a start, whether LBA 0 forward or final LBA (max LBA) in reverse depending on your config. Most basic utilities do this forward.
Drives have built in cache, so unless disabled, there is some reading ahead of what the user sees on the screen.
Best would be to perform some basic diagnostic to determine random LBA access through out the drive is possible. Can use MHDD for that.

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

I've been trying to put MHDD on a usb stick without results, i was able to boot but mhdd doesn't detect any drivers (i have 3).

Hey,
Ive burned the ultimate boot disk which has the mhdd, unfortunetly it doesnt show any of my drives but i used other tools, the Seagate tool for dos after failing says to check the Power cycle. This disk was not heavly used nor it is old, which make me think the problemas is in the circuito but then short test passes and long test makes it shutdown.

For MHDD to work properly, have to change BIOS settings to IDE mode.

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Thanks! It detected now, unfortunetly the disk as so many bad blocks that i didn't even wasted more time with it. 3 hours later on 2.9% with 20 UNC and around 200 <500ms, with estimated time around 60 hours.

Are the UNCs repetitive sector after sector?
Have you read any sectors successfully (seems like yes but asking to make sure)? If yes, can you read any sectors successfully in the middle or at the end of the drive?

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

no, they are separated by few sectors i was seeing intervals of "green" sectors yellow sectors, but when it gets to red(UNC) it stops for like 3min then it puts a blue sector right to it and right after that reads something like 4 or 5 sectors and finds one red again.

Sounds like the read write components are weak or just damaged. Possible firmware issues as well.

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

See http://malthus.zapto.org/viewtopic.php?f=83&t=557

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

i never thought i would find a community like this in here, thanks alot for the attention

btw,
i have a hard drive here that clicks once in awhile, now i've read that this is normal but i've been noticing that everytime it clicks theres a little freeze in the PC. If it clicks when something is loading it stops and starts right after a matter of ms. Could this be something that i would be able to fix?

Maybe.. Need more testing to identify the exact problem(s). Some things are fixable while other aren't. Though in some cases, if not fixable, then could be preventable.
MHDD is a first good step for such diagnostic.

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts