I tried searching for previous posts on this which is likely a common question. Came up with an empty search.

My WD Blue drive is giving the cannot unlock disk, you must have open files error. I just did a Seagate yesterday and it went smoothly.

I opened the program from the cd drive after a fresh reboot and turned of anything I could see in the start menu. What is the usual cure for a locked drive?

My reason for reformat is SMART is showing unrecoverable sectors and clone programs like Ghost find bad blocks. CrystalDisk info shows the drive as "Caution."

Drive is damaged and a simple "format" or 0-fill will not work as expected; not only that storing data on a dying drive is dangerouse.
The only way to get some "extra" life from that dying WD drive is to use a sepecial factory Self Scan (maybe even with ARCO) to rte-cert the drive. This will require special tools and knowledge.
So just buy a new drive and start over if data is not needed, as it's the safest option and cheaper option too.
You can also donate the drive to someone with tools to re-certify the drive or ask if there are someone near you that can do the job without charging more that it would cost to get a new drive to start with ....

Regards.

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Thanks for answering. Elsewhere here it was mentioned that deleting any partitions and then wiping would eliminate the 'cannot lock error.'

This indeed worked and the LL Format ran. Unfortunately the drive still shows caution and Uncorrectable Sectors, though Current Pending sector count changed to 'blue' : OK in Crystal Disk info terms.

I believe I have done all I can with it now. It works but cannot be used as a main.

I appreciate the HDD Guru tools and thank you for your service.

Maybe you should post a SMART log of the drive so we can check.
I think that by running the low level format (well, by writting to all surface) the sectors that were wainting to be re-located ended up swapped with spares, and that is why the status of "current pending" did change and the number of the "realocated sector count" should have increased.
Regards.

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I do not know how you can inspect for 'before' and after but tell me how how to get the SMART log. I know SMART info is available in the HDDG LL Format but do not know how to get the log.

As I recall Pending and Uncorrectable were both 200. Pending changed to 100.

Anyway tell me how to get the text file to post if you have interest.

Here is the SMART file from a prog called Disk Checkup:


Sorry the format is off, but in a small text box what could I do?

This is a SATA drive.


*** DiskCheckup V3.2 Build: 1000 Report ***

SysInfo DLL Version: SysInfo v1.0 Build: 1041
Time of export: 14:12:07 03-May-2014

Device information:
Device ID: 1
Interface: ATA
Device Capacity: 305242 MB
Serial Number: WD-WCAV2P399247
Model Number: WDC WD3200AAJS-00L7A0
Firmware Revision: 01.03E01
Partitions:
D: 305242 MB

ATA information:

Disk geometry:
Cylinders: 38913
Tracks/Cylinder: 255
Sectors/Track: 63
Bytes/Sector: 512
Total disk sectors: 625142448
Logical sector size: 512
Physical sector size: 512
Media rotation rate: N/A
Buffer size: 8192 KB
ECC size: 50 Bytes

Standards compliance:
ATA8-ACS Supported: Yes
ATA/ATAPI-7 Supported: Yes
ATA/ATAPI-6 Supported: Yes
ATA/ATAPI-5 Supported: Yes
ATA/ATAPI-4 Supported: Yes
Serial/Parallel: Serial
SATA 3.0 Compilance: No
SATA 2.6 Compilance: No
SATA 2.5 Compilance: Yes
SATA II: Ext Compilance: Yes
SATA 1.0a Compilance: Yes
ATA8-AST Compilance: No
World Wide ID: 50014EE102DB0787

Feature support:
SMART supported: Yes
SMART enabled: Yes
SMART self-test supported: Yes
SMART error log supported: Yes
LBA supported: Yes
IORDY supported: Yes
CFast supported: No
DMA supported: Yes
Maximum Multiword DMA mode supported: 2
Multiword DMA selected: None
Maximum UltraDMA mode supported: 6
UltraDMA selected: 6
Maximum PIO mode supported: 4
SATA Compliance: Yes
NCQ priority information supported: No
Unload while NCQ commands are outstanding supported: No
Phy Event Counters supported: Yes
Receipt of power management requests supported: Yes
NCQ feature set supported: Yes
SATA Gen2 Signaling Speed (3.0Gb/s) supported: Yes
SATA Gen1 Signaling Speed (1.5Gb/s) supported: Yes
Software Settings Preservation: Supported, Enabled
In-order data delivery: Not supported
Initiating power management: Not supported
DMA Setup auto-activation: Supported, Disabled
Non-zero buffer offsets: Not supported
Trusted Computing supported: No
Host Protected Area (HPA) supported: Yes
Read look-ahead supported: Yes
Read look-ahead enabled: Yes
Write cache supported: Yes
Write cache enabled: Yes
Power management supported: Yes
Security mode supported: Yes
Security mode enabled: No
Device Configuration Overlay (DCO) supported: Yes
48bit Addressing supported: Yes
Auto Acoustic Managment (AAM) supported: Yes
Auto Acoustic Managment (AAM) enabled: No
Power-up in Standby (PUIS) supported: Yes
Power-up in Standby (PUIS) enabled: No
Advanced Power Management (APM) supported: No
CompactFlash Association (CFA) supported: No
General Purpose Logging (GPL) supported: Yes
Streaming supported: No
Media card pass through supported: No
Extended power conditions supported: No
Extended status reporting supported: No
Write-read-verify supported: No
Free-fall control supported: No
TRIM command supported: No
SCT command transport supported: Yes
NV Cache enabled: No
NV Cache Power Management supported: No

SMART ATTRIBUTES:
ID Description Status Value Worst Threshold Raw Value TEC
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Raw Read Error Rate OK 200 200 51 106 N.A.
3 Spin Up Time OK 135 131 21 4233 N.A.
4 Start/Stop Count OK 99 99 0 1107 N.A.
5 Reallocated Sector Count OK 200 200 140 0 N.A.
7 Seek Error Rate OK 100 253 0 0 N.A.
9 Power On Time OK 90 90 0 7893 N.A.
10 Spin Retry Count OK 100 100 0 0 N.A.
11 Calibration Retry Count OK 100 100 0 0 N.A.
12 Power Cycle Count OK 99 99 0 1094 N.A.
192 Power off Retract Count OK 200 200 0 530 N.A.
193 Load Cycle Count OK 200 200 0 1107 N.A.
194 Temperature OK 94 86 0 49 C N.A.
196 Reallocation Event Count OK 200 200 0 0 N.A.
197 Current Pending Sector Count OK 200 200 0 0 N.A.
198 Uncorrectable Sector Count OK 200 200 0 5 N.A.
199 UltraDMA CRC Error Count OK 200 200 0 1 N.A.
200 Write Error Count OK 200 200 0 3 N.A.

Can't see anything THAT bad from the SMART log.
....
Maybe you should just plug the drive directly to SATA (if not already) and run MHDD on it.
You don't apear to need the data, so do an erase of the drive and then use the scan command and check access time for each sector (you shouldn't have anything below green on mhdd and if you have greens they should be few.) If you have lots of reds then discard the drive.
Doing an erase should remap any secrtor that can't be written or swap it with a spare, if needed. Then check SMART again to see if the Reallocated Sector Count have increased. IF NOT and if the drive doesn't have any slow sectors and you can erase it and scan it without error you should be ok ...
But don't forget to backup all the data anyway !

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It's good we are talking about MHDD. I got an error with a drive I wanted to run scan on and it said not an LBA drive or the like. I note in DiskInfo that most of my HDs are LBA. Where do these errors come from?


I know these must be noob questions.

I would like to become proficient with using MHDD-- was running the DOS window version in Win XP.