I picked up this hard disk in a bin. Sadly, its an OEM hard disk and has no warranty. Produced roughly a year ago.

It starts up and bios picks it up fine.

But when trying to use it, or partitioning it, it gives odd noises, like wagging head, and an intermittent clicking sound. My system also slows down with the mentioned hard disk connected.

It picks up some bad sectors and manages to fix it. I've tried DOS-based utilities and they slow down from the fact the hard disk also performs slowly.

I've seen some forums mention it has a flawed firmware, but looking at the SMART data, it says it had way too many reallocated sectors.

Here's what I want to happen:
1. If it's a firmware flaw, I need a patch or a link to its proper firmware. Or how to do it.
2. If it is some kind of mechanical error, which I find unlikely, what are my options, and what should I do?
3. If there's reported problems of similar models getting the same trouble, I'd like to know how to go through getting it fixed.

There seems to have been a good reason why this drive was in a bin.


Please supply links to the relevant webpages on those forums that you mentioned, so that we can read them.

Personally I don't think you will fix this and make the drive reliable, unfortunately, based on those symptoms. If you did get the necessary equipment, donor parts, and take the time to learn the required skills, that would all cost much more than just buying a new equivalent drive (since the data on the drive is not required). However I look forward to reading the webpages that you mentioned, to see why those people are reporting that your symptoms can be the result of a firmware problem.

Scratch the flawed firmware. It's referencing from sites like fixya, helpowl and others are of generally dubious sources.

As for why I dipped myself in tar in getting that bad hdd-- well, let's just say I want to try to fix it, I fix computers for a living and I need to pick up some skills for my job. If I can't fix it, I can always walk away from it. But it's a shame something of that capacity would go bad.

I live in a country where options are quite limited at the moment, so you have to make do of what's there, and fix stuff that's broken but can be given a new lease of life.

I noticed that the problem sectors occur at the latter parts of the disk. I wonder if resizing the disk using something like mhdd will fix it since I'll bar the disk from using the full capacity?

So why list that as point (1) in your previous guesses, and therefore encourage me to waste my time commenting on that point, if you already knew those suggestions were "dubious"?


Really "fix it"? No.

IMHO your choices depend on exactly what expectations you have, for how this disk would behave after your actions (reliability, performance etc.) but at this point I'll stop and let other people give you opinions.

To really FIX it (assuming it is possible, only the fact that it was in the bin can mean it is like the disk has been kicked HARD) you need specialized tools + know how. PERIOD.

I would use this drive as a learning tool. Sometimes you can learn more from a bad drive than a good one.

When you are done with it, you could always sell the PCB on Ebay.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.