Thread: dead hdd?

[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

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.