dead hdd?

[Pedro_The_Swift]

[this is one of my twin WD black caviar's,, not my current C drive]
vista wont install,
XP (and chkdsk)thinks its either RAW data, or write protected,
half the HDD programs on Hirens cant see it.
mini xp see's it but cant format it,

I wonder when I bought it,, it has a 5 year warranty

[mikehzz]

I've had a few of those fail along with Samsungs and Seagates. I only use Hitachi Ultrastar now. They seem better for the time being at least. All hard drives are getting more unreliable in my opinion.

[incisor]

I've had a few of those fail along with Samsungs and Seagates. I only use Hitachi Ultrastar now. They seem better for the time being at least. All hard drives are getting more unreliable in my opinion.

the good old deathstar

i agree ..

i reckon they must have dropped the mtbf quite significantly lately on all the majors...

still cant bring myself to buy hitachi after previous experiences...

[Dukkar]

Might be possible the partition itself is corrupt. If you need the data from the drive you'll be in trouble if that is the case.
If you don't, I suggest you boot with Hiren's, UBCD or a Linux distribution, remove the partitions with fdisk or parted etc and recreate them and format.
It might be that you have hard drives with taste and standards and are making a stand, refusing to be inflicted with Windows... :)

[Dukkar]

Hard Drives are pushing the limits, and the quality drop is partly to do with that. It is also an indicator that they've reached their end of development life. i.e. the next thing is coming, at this stage it looks like SSD drives. It happened with Floppy Disks and it happened with CDRs. Older Floppies and CDRs held their data much longer and were much more reliable and better quality than later Floppies and CDRs. Some of the "advances" are less technical advances and more 'we can now make it cheaper' "advances". Example: Early CDRs, remember they told us they could hold data almost forever? they could, the recording surface was made of metals, good ones were gold, silver was also used. Then they found a way to use fungus instead of the expensive metals to make them cheaper. These CDRs can lose their data after a couple of years when the fungus grows over the holes...it can and does happen. You can still get the gold CDR if you look, you can tell by looking at them and they're marketed as archival quality.