Hi

I have this classic clicking problem on my WD800JB, but in my case it has been doing this for years and I have always been able to work around it by simply power off the computer, wait for the hard drive to spin down and then power on again. Lately I've tried to solve the issue and have run several diagnostic tools, and they all show the same behavior. At about sector 71704xxx the clicking starts. MHDD, unlike the other diagnostic tools, is actually able to continue after this sector. It takes about 2min with clicking, then it marks the sector with either a "!" or a red square and then finishes the test. So it would appear that the only problem with the disk is a single sector (or set of sectors <255) where the arm is unable to get a reading. (I have no knowledge of hard drives but this is my best guess).

What should my next step be? I'm in the middle of an ERASE operation now but I doubt it will solve anything. Is there a way to mark a certain area of a drive as a "no no"?

Thanks in advance.

First of all, what Is your goal?
Do you need to recover data from the drive or do you just want to repair the drive? Since you are doing an erase, I will asume you don't care for the data, and are focued on repairing the drive.
You could try to put the bad sectors into the G-list (grown defect list).
But I don't think you can do this with MHDD.
Also what does MHDD tell you about the bad sector?
Posting the log here could help.

yes you are right. My goal is to fix the drive, or to make it less broken... There's no data on the disk.

As I expected ERASE didn't do anything. It stopped around that sector and gave a "CATASTROPHIC FAILURE: Broken drive"... something like that. But I've been able to work with the drive in this state for several years as long as I stay away from that part of the drive so this can't be entirely true.

If I run scan it marks one of the blocks with a "!", and according to the legend this means ABRT, which I assume is short for abort, so it seems it can't make anything out of that sector.

I ran scan again with the "Erase Delays" option enabled, and it marked two blocks with a "W". I thought "Great, now those blocks are marked as bad" but when I ran scan again it stopped at the same sector... So, really all I need is to somehow tell the drive simply to ignore those two blocks, but how? I guess I could leave the area between 71,000,000 and 72,000,000 unallocated and build partitions on both sides instead... what do you think?