Drive in the trash?

S

sl1982

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 24, 2008
Messages
365
Hey guys i have a WD 500gb hd that i bought (Mybook) and im having problems with it. I ended up taking it out of the enclosure to run some test on it. I ran WD diagnostics on it and it says it has too many bad sectors to replace. Is there any way i can just mark these sectors as bad and not use them? Or is the drive shot?
 
Basically a drive has a fixed number of unused sectors that when it finds a bad one it will mark as bad and use one of those unused ones in it's place. (so when something calls to read or write to the bad sector it will instead read and write to the unused one) This is coded in firmware and isn't something you can mess with. What you could try to do is partition around the bad sectors.. I did this many many years ago back when hard drives were expensive and I had a 750MB drive with too many bad sectors (I created two partitions, leaving some unpartitioned space between them where the bad sectors were).. But really you are far better off spending a few bucks and buying a new drive.
 
I'd get a new drive. A few bad sectors is normal throughout the operational life of a hard drive. However, having a lot of them isn't a good sign.
 
That drive should still be under warranty, to be honest. Removing it from the enclosure basically voided it but I'll bet if you go to WD's website and start the RMA process, use the serial number on the hard drive itself - DO NOT USE THE SERIAL ON THE ENCLOSURE, of course - it might come up and have life left on the warranty to get a replacement.

There are options available to you at this point instead of chucking it in the garbage. If you're just going to toss the whole thing, I'll pay shipping and take it off your hands. :)
 
Joe Average said:
That drive should still be under warranty, to be honest. Removing it from the enclosure basically voided it but I'll bet if you go to WD's website and start the RMA process, use the serial number on the hard drive itself - DO NOT USE THE SERIAL ON THE ENCLOSURE, of course - it might come up and have life left on the warranty to get a replacement.

There are options available to you at this point instead of chucking it in the garbage. If you're just going to toss the whole thing, I'll pay shipping and take it off your hands. :)
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Does not work. Western Digital archives the serial numbers with their shipped products. I know a few folks who killed new drive warranties simply by removing it from the casing.


It should not work that way, but the way they see it is that you are messing with the drive or else you would have just RMA'ed it in its enclosure.
 
Yeah thats the thing. According the WD the mybook external drives only have a 1 year warranty. It was already up so I had nothing to lose. Its pretty stupid considering any internal drive has at least a 3 year warranty

Also how would I partition around it? I am saving up for a new drive but those damn TB drives arent cheap.
 
Well I did it with a linux partition tool way back and forget which one exactly but you would create a partition from x sector to y sector, then again for the 2nd one.. and I had a general idea of where the bad blocks were.. But this is a lot easier to be aware of where the bad blocks are with a 750 MB drive than a 500GB one.
 
Ockie said:
Does not work. Western Digital archives the serial numbers with their shipped products. I know a few folks who killed new drive warranties simply by removing it from the casing.


It should not work that way, but the way they see it is that you are messing with the drive or else you would have just RMA'ed it in its enclosure.
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Interesting enough I did this and did an RMA with the serial number of the drive itself. WD had no problems taking back the drive and they actually sent me a new external drive (in a new enclosure). Kind of made me LOL a bit since I used the old WD enclosure and put a 250 GB seagate in it. Still have it.
 
you could try Harddrive Regenerator, it has performed some miracles for me. I wouldnt trust the drive for anything important, but if you need to get some data off of it, it couldnt hurt.

http://www.dposoft.net/
 
Always try a different cable as well to remove any doubt ^_^
 
Hmm maybe i should try to RMA it. Do they need a reciept or anything like that? Dont think I have it anymore.
 
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