I brought a hard drive (kinda) back to life last night, wonder if it has the taint of the undead before I use it as my main.

It all started when one night windows BSOD'd on me, and I restated, thinking user (idiot) error. Screen displayed

Unmountable boot volume

and that was it. It made a different noise, as well...

So, I restarted. Now, it won't recognize that it's there. Hmm...

Okay, so I get back to jasper, where I have time to work. I plug it up, as a slave, and neither will recognize! There's a running hard drive already there...

So I remove it, and the running one, install the "dead" drive. I put in my 2000 disk and attempt to boot...
and it does. So, after blasting the old OS with the disk, I rebooted the computer with my good hard drive, and formatted it NTFS.

First question-Why would it take all night to format? and second, is this thing still safe/useable?

Bad clusters slow the heck outta reformatting because Windows trys to "recover" every last dang one of em at considerable length.

I also stuffed it in the freezer in a ziploc bag, and that helped...

I just need to know if you think it'll be stable.

and once you have bad clusters you might as well just use it for mindless storage (nothing worth keeping...maybe as a temporary hard drive), something neat for your table or just a paperweight.

I wouldn't trust it ...

... if it's an older HD, take the cover off & use it as a paperweight (edit: great minds think alike TAz?).

If it's the newer sort (completely rectangular), dismantle it to retrieve the mother of all fridge magnets.

60 GB IBM deskstar...

Wanted to be sure I don't have to replace it... but I get reports from elsewhere that it's perfectly fine...

Something about windows screwing itself...

I had a 10gig HD with about 10mb worth of bad clusters that lasted for at lest a year and a half of active use.

That's what I needed...

I RMA'd three of those drives before I finally threw that last one up on Ebay for sale. Do yourself a favor and lose it as soon as possible.

Well, I'm gonna migrate to the 30 then...

Kayin: that drive has earned the nickname 'Deathstar' for a reason. I'd go with Jon's second suggestion. The MOTHER of all fridge magnets - HDD magnets ROCK!

yes, i also had one of those....

the hd is dubbed the deathstar... because they die so often

strongest magnet known to man

Scandisk'll tell ya how many bad clusters it has.

How new is it? New enough to RMA or Warranty?

If you hit the following link:

http://www.storage.ibm.com/hddredirect.html?supcallbox

you can plug in your drive serial number and it will tell you if it qualifies for warranty or RMA support. Hitachi handles all the warranties for the Deathstar line now; IBM dropped them like a hot potato after all the lawsuits.