Help!Maxtor 6E040L0 problem

[Mr.G]

Hello

someone gave me this Maxtor 6E040L0, it's a 40gig drive as you may have guessed already.
the drive itself does not have any mechanical malfunction as I know of.It has a problem though, as viewed in it's SMART ATT:
Reallocated Sectors Count is 1 and the normal thershold is 63.
So i guess it had too many bad sectors and has reallocated the maximum possible number of spare sectors.
I used MHDD and scaned the HDD, found several bad sectors, tried REMAP and ERASE and i don;t think it worked.I also tried HDD REGENERATOR and it has recoverd the sectors, but it seems that several sectors around the ones recovered are getting harder to access 200ms> + 500ms even.
Then i tried to erase, or fill with zeros the hdd but for some reason i had to cancel it.now the drive is barely seen by windows xp, and when i scan it every sector in it is bad.
But i know for sure if i leave it unpowered for several hours, it will be back to normal, possibly regain some bad sectors.
I ask you...what kind of a problem is this?Logical or hardware??
even if this may sound stupid, but the firmware NAR61590 could have been corrupted?
Could i ever get this drive to run, not perfect but in a ok state even with some bad sectors??
And what do you think about the situation?Thanks in advance

[Starling]

Heads/platters are degrading.
Forget about this drive.

[Mr.G]

well ok that's what i wanted to hear.
you can lock this topic