Just curious:

I have this Western Digital WD2500BPVT-22ZEST0 drive I talked about in the WD password unlocking thread and I just don't feel like giving up on it quite yet.

So my question is this:

Can a corrupt(ed) firmware on the drive cause it to "appear" to be defective with random errors all over the place, and by random I mean that if I test the drive with MHDD I'll start seeing bad sectors (and I mean bad, as in MHDD locks up and then shows an "x" and says it's uncorrectable) early on in the drive's structure (like in the first 128MB) then a lot of clean clear space, then more bad sectors later on at about 1% in, etc, almost like it happens every few percentage points into the capacity. At some point the process will choke and die and then the drive just reports errors constantly as it zips through the sectors (I'm figuring a calibration error that can't correct itself).

Then I'll reboot the machine and do the test with HDAT2 and it'll go clear into 8% of the drive before it finds even one bad sector - and then it'll find a string of them, and then do the same think and choke with a series of errors that it never recovers from.

So... then I try Victoria and it'll get to about 4% of the drive and then choke and die.

In other words, the errors keep happening in random spots, not in the same exact places - one would think that if MHDD says sector 121,014 is bad and marks it as a bad with an "x" that the next diagnostic tool would pretty much get to the same sector and realize "Yep, it's bad" and mark it as such but it doesn't.

Is it possible that a corrupt(ed) firmware just causes random potential errors all over the place and each diagnostic tool is going to result in completely random errors that might not actually exist?

I've even started MHDD and jumped to 10 million, 20 million, 30, 40, 80, 120, 225, and 300 million sectors in and it does the same thing almost perfectly: it'll scan for a bit with clear sectors, then find some waits, then some more waits, then worse numbers of waits, then finally a completely bad sector ("x") and then the process dies and it just errors out continuously.

Final question: if it's a corrupt(ed) firmware, is there any potential for an end user like myself to recover it and restore the firmware, at all? Seems like such a waste of what appears to be a mechanically sound drive from what I can tell - it's always detected in the BIOS across 3 different testing machines (2 desktops, 1 laptop), MHDD always has access to it as do the other tools, and yet the actual detected errors just keeps changing constantly - it's never the same two tests in a row.

I'm stumped at this point but would love to recover the drive for use (the data on it was never relevant) if possible.

Any assistance or suggestions are welcome, thanks.

Sounds like a bad head. Not DIY repairable.

If you don't need the data, then just bin it.

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