Hey all,

I'm moderately certain my HD is fubar'd, but I thought I'd find out if anyone has any ideas I haven't thought of yet.

HD failure last night, & after trying all of the standard stuff (fixboot, fixmbr, chkdsk, etc, etc), I eventually scanned the drive with mhdd and found block 1 of the disk to be unrecoverable (UNC), along with 7 other random blocks. 8 blocks isn't normally too dire, so long story short, I tried some other tricks to get around the bad block 1 (various partition recovery tools, testdisk, the WD WinDlg tool, etc), none of which worked - couldn't recover any data at all.

So, to the issue at hand: I decided that a low level format was the way to go, to see if I could recover drive functionality. I tried it first in mhdd, which gave me a "Catastrophic Failure" immediately upon typing in the 'erase' command. This was at about 4:30 in the morning, mind you, so I had to laugh - perfect description of my efforts so far . I then fired up the Low Level Format Tool with UBCD4Win, and tried that.

I now have, up on the screen:

Hard Disk Low Level Format Tool 2.36 build 1181; http://hddguru.com
Low Level Format: WDC WD360ADFD-00NLR1 20.07P20 [37.01 Gbytes]
Device size: 72,303,840 sectors
Format Error occured at offset 15,728,640
Format Error occured at offset 16,252,928
Format Error occured at offset 16,777,216

I started the format a few hours ago, and that's as far as it's gotten. The time between format errors 2 & 3 was well over a half hour - even if it was running at a million sectors an hour, it would still take 3 days to finish, and I can't wait on this thing that long. LLFTool.exe is sitting in task manager with zero cpu usage, and the 'Current Task Progress' bar is showing zero progress - not sure what to make of that.

I'm pretty resigned to the fact that I'm going to have to buy a new hard drive - this one was ancient anyway, but it was a raptor, and perfect for running xp on my desktop... would like to salvage if even the slightest chance of doing so.

Anyone either:

A: Know what the Format Errors portend? They sound somewhat ominous...
or
B: Had any sort of luck recovering functionality where the mbr sector is a tiny little charred heap of magnet inside the disk?

Cheers!

regnak