Blue Screen Of Death is caused most likely by bad sectors which occupied by NT loader of your windows. Backup your data and buy a new drive. Update firmware? no i dont think that is the caused.

What makes you think it's firmware?

The firmware from the thread requires expensive tools. It's meant for data recovery, not as "the latest and greatest update to your Hard Drive".

Are you sure it's even the Hard Drive? BSOD's usually have a code or description you can Google. It might be a fan that died on your CPU, Motherboard chipset, or video card. Perspectives vary, but from what I've seen, I'd put my money on a bad fan, or some other component failing (CPU, Memory, MB, Power Supply). I'd check the drive, but it wouldn't be the first thing I'd check.

Try using MHDD to diagnose the Hard Drive.

Also, if you have any interest in getting your data back, and the drive actually is failing, you need to make an image of the drive FIRST. Any other fiddling around will lessen the chances of anyone recovering your data. The fiddling some people do sometimes takes a perfectly good drive to the HD graveyard, taking the data as well.

Hi Friends
Thanks for your help. The BSOD's showed varying ' curses' . The most common was a kernel_in_page_error or some like that. Most common goggled cause was HDD failure. I agree with what the gentleman just said - about investing in trying to get back your data from a HDD on respirators and sending it to death. Fortunately I got back my data and the HDD is right now co-operative enough to give more than a few spins as long as I dont make it run - but soon as I copy or move even 50mb of data there is the BSOD.
I think I got it all wired wrong - that firmware could be the reason. Apparently 'firmwaring' the drive is a different ball game. So I just threw it off - and got a new one.
Thanks for all your help folks have a great week-end
Bye
Sam