Hi,
I recently got a WD passport 250gb external USB hard drive second hand, when pluged in the hard drive shows up and windows tells me it needs to be formated before use, however when i try to format it i am given an error saying it cannot format, if i try to open the drive i get "F:/ is not accessable, the request could not be performed because of an I/O error". I am currently running Low level format tool 2.36 on the drive and after around 10 hours it is a quarter of the way through the scan, it is finding around 3-4 "Format error eccurred at offset" per second on the drive, i figured this is why the scan is taking so long. Any ideas whether this scan is going to help or is there more serious problems with the drive?

also Low level format tool reconises the drive correctly as a 250.0gb drive where windows does not show any information about its size ect.

Thanks,
Stuart

First of all, hi to everyone, I'm new to this forum.

Well, a few days ago I found I was unable to boot my OS because of a logical error in my internal WD1600LB hd. Since I didn't have the need to recover any data from this hd, I proceeded to connect the hd to another PC (with windows xp) and I am currently running the Low Level Format Tool. In fact, it's been running and trying to write zeros for quite a few hours, but seemingly to no avail. At the end of the process when the program tries to overwrite the sector # 154 I get an error message: "Error ocurred at offsset...", and it seems it can go on like this forever, giving me the same error for each and every following sector of the disk.

Perhaps it was my fault and I missunderstood something, but I thought this Low level format tool was able to write zeros, without the need of a previous scan and detection of defectuous sectors. Am I right?

Any advise would be much appreciated

Maybe a better question to ask would be, how much is a 160GB drive worth? How much will the data you store on it be worth? To save the cost of a 160Gb drive, are you willing to pay the price of data recovery? How much is your time worth to fiddle with, and 'fix' this drive, lose your data, 'fix' it again, etc...?

In simple terms, it sounds like you have a bad drive.

@mechanismo, don't queue on another sthread, start a new one.

And, you likely have a bad drive. As you tried to LLF it the data was not important. Keep it or sell it for parts (the PCB maybe is ok) , and get a new one. I can fix it but it requires expensive gear to do it, and maybe some errors are unrecoverable (i.e. the drive was bumped so we have a bad scratch or a head problem).

There is no easy fix available for this drive.

_________________
www.datarecoveryne.com

Thank you all for your kind and prompt replies.

@rchadwick: I don't ignore that this old IDE 160 GB disk is just a piece of junk, but what is really worth is knowing exactly what can be done, and what cannot be done, when it comes to repaire a disk... Besides, you can't always run to the next megastore around the corner when you find you're having a hardware issue, can you?

@BlackST: Sorry! I'll make a note for the next time