What to do with old hard drives

[gopher_yarrowzoo]

You know you guys probably got a stack of 'em some that have life in them, some that appear to have life in them but you just can't use 'em as a boot drive and the plain dead that you maybe managed to wipe before it died.

So what to do with all these old drives, reason I ask is the 500Gb Sata I have is now FAILING :( wouldn't be a problem if it hadn't started to hunt from stuff and lock my machine totally up while I was gaming....
I power cycled it - Windows Boot Fail - couldn't find one of the Reg HIVES or it was corrupt.
2 reboots and a several trips into the Recovery console it's back and working.
I ran Spinrite over it - 14 Unrecoverable errors on the windows partition.
It's a goner or is it?
I put in a spare 250Gb IDE I had Cloned the 500Gb to it - no boot :| gets windows up again on 500 - loaded up PM 8 - disk marked BAD :( I have no luck it would seem yet I can read / write it odd.
Guess I'll be having to buy a new drive, well there goes the thought of a laptop maybe.

[LAURENU2]

So Are you going to tell us
"What to do with old hard drives"

[Bigred]

Been there. Done that. I've seen lots of those. First try to backup anything important. If you have trouble with this then try connecting it to another computer and run PC Inspector file recovery. As long as the system sees the drive there is a good chance of getting your stuff back. When you've saved what you wanted or just give up trying, go to the manufacturers Web Site and download thier latest utility package. It is usually in an ISO format for burning onto a CD. Boot from the CD and pick the option to low level format the drive. This identifies all the bad sectors and marks them as unusable. After this the drive should be usable again but be warned there is a very good chance it will fail again. I've seen some that lasted for a year or more and others that failed again within an hour. Bottom line, start saving for that new drive.:eek:

[gopher_yarrowzoo]

Yeah I've got the money thankfully just the hassle of getting and transferring the data.