HDD recovery... Won't format

Hey folks. Recenty I bought and installed a refurbished 160GB Fujitsu for a buddy's laptop, which I formatted and installed XP on. It ran fine for about a week, then started having some startup problems (Wouldn't go past the XP logo). It would start in safe mode though, but would occasionally freeze and require a hard reboot. Using the recovery console within the XP installation disk, I ran chkdsk /r at the command prompt, which ran normally for about an hour, then froze (left it overnight) at 61%. I restarted the laptop and it said operating system not found. I've tried to reformat the drive by installing XP again, won't work. I tried putting it in an external SATA enclosure and reformat using both Windows, and Parted Magic. Neither will work. I've seen this before, but in the past I've always just replaced the drive. Does anybody know of any techniques, or some decent software, that can recovery/repair these kinds of problems? Thanks.

 

Yeah I tend to agree.... And that's what I've always done. Seems like a shame to turf the drive though if it can be fixed. I figured there might be some SW that could eliminate the damaged sectors or something.

 

Start - my computer - hard drive - right click - properties - tools - first tab - check - error checking - check second tab and run it , 95 % hdd is dead !! :tas

 

Sorry should have mentioned... In a Windows environment as soon as I hook the drive up (within a USB-SATA enclosure), Windows gives me a message saying the drive needs to be formatted. The format then of course fails. So, it never actually comes up in My Computer. It does however come up in disk management, but the option isn't there to check for errors. Going back to my original post, I tried checkdisk via the command promt but it froze at 61%.

 

True enough... I'm running a program called killdisk right now, it takes a while but may make it recognizable. You're right though, probably won't last long.

 

Ok , i understand this !! :cry