Shall I throw away this hard drive?

Crystal Disk shows a caution on one of my old drives, a 120GB Desktar. It's been fine for years, but I recently removed it from the IDE socket and put it in a new USB enclosure. Heard clicking when it was turned on, saw the folders and files on the drive, but messages came up saying corrupted whenever I tried to open something. I couldn't access anything. Rebooted the PC, message came up in taskbar saying device driver installed for the drive (successful) but wasn't showing in my computer. Went to disk management and it said it had to be initialized! I cancelled out and didn't initialize. It said 99.04GB unallocated. This is a drive that had previously said 115GB total size, 34.9GB free space.


I went and found my IDE cable, took the deskstar out of the USB box, and installed it back to my motherboard. Upon booting I heard the clicks again, then got a DOS type screen saying about problems on drive F: and how it needs to perform a chkdsk. I had a few seconds to decide or opt out but I let it go into the checking. Millions upon millions of entries scrolled as in this screenshot below and I was like ..


But then, there was light at the end of the tunnel. After a few minutes I noticed scores of scrolling entries saying 'recovering'. Then it booted into windows and lo and behold, I can access all my stuff!

Before this happened, total size was 115GB, free space 34.9GB. Now it says 115 GB, 47.2GB. So I guess it must have deleted 12GB of files that were corrupted. Well, whatever that 12GB of stuff was, it's gone now, so there's nothing I can do and it probably wasn't very important. The only thing of importance still on the drive is my fraps folder which contains 67GB of screenshots and game movies, so I'm glad I have those back. I've transferred that stuff to my other drive. I've now done a quick format on the drive and Crystal Disk still shows the same reallocated caution.

I've got another IDE drive, an old WD Caviar Blue 320GB. I'll install that to the motherboard this time and transfer everything, just in case it's the USB enclosure that's corrupting these drives, or perhaps it's just a general IDE to USB incompatibility.


So what do I do with this 120GB drive now? Is it worth doing a full format, or using killdisk, or trying some program that might fix the reallocated sectors, or is it an unfixable dying drive and I should bin it?

I would transfer all your important files onto a different hard-drive as you have done already, and I would consider keeping a eye on the failing hard-drive, but consider getting a replacement as I think it's nearing the end of it's life.

x BlueRobot said:

I would transfer all your important files onto a different hard-drive as you have done already, and I would consider keeping a eye on the failing hard-drive, but consider getting a replacement as I think it's nearing the end of it's life.

Yeah, I'm glad I've got the stuff off it and backed up. I just installed my other 320GB IDE drive and fortunately it's healthy and is currently being backed up too. So it's just the deskstar which is the problem. I'll keep my eye on it but don't actually need it tbh, I already have four other drives plus an SSD amounting to over 4TB

So more as an exercise than anything else, what could I try to see if the reallocated sectors on the 120GB drive can be sorted out?

You could run Disk Check again:

Disk Check

Or go to the manufacturer's website, they usually have some hard-drive diagnosis tools which you can boot from a CD/DVD:

• Downloads
• Western Digital Hard Drives, Network Drives, Media Players

The HGST website came up when I searched with the name of the hard-drive, and claimed to be a Western Digital company so added that website too; I'm not completely sure if they have their own diagnosis programs but worth having a check.

Have a look on this website too, it lists a range of hard-drive testing programs:

7 Free Hard Drive Testing Programs

I've seen Seagate be recommended by almost everyone on the forums:

• Seagate Tools

Thanks, I'll check those out.

Roman5 said:

Thanks, I'll check those out.

Your welcome, added a few more links to my post, just in case you didn't notice them all (: