So, I've got this piece of c.r.a.p. Samsung 320GB HDD which I got from my dad when it crashed, and figured I'd have a go at reviving the thing.

First of all, the SMART-status is bad, so I thought I'd have a go at secure formatting it in Partition Magic, which took forever, but I'm pretty sure what ever was on there will never come back.

Now, the drive is listing in My Computer, and it seems to be good, although SMART is still bad. So I gave it a go with SpinRite Level 4, which took 56 hours (I had the damn thing in my bedroom PC, so I've had a few nights of bad sleep cause of noise). Basically what SpinRite does, is write binary onto every sector of the disk, filling it up, then inverts the 0's to 1's and 1's to 0's. This is done 2 times. It would also seem like it updates the SMART-data. After the process was completed, it didn't show any bad blocks on the disk, so I thought it would be okay now, but still, no go on the SMART-status.

Any idea? I've heard that the SMART-scan is pretty retarded, and I would think that the disk is in good shape now, so what do you think?

You should give up on Samsung Hard Drive coz those things have so many faults. I bought one of those - gave me a problem returned it back, they sent me another Samsung and this time another fault and sent it again, this time told them not to give me a Samsung drive.

Now I got a 500GB Hitachi running as smooth as ICE

Never had a problem with either Samsung or Hitachi tbh

Hard drives come down to luck mostly (unless its a maxtor :p)

Or if you are throwin it around xD

Hard drives come down to luck mostly (unless its a maxtor :p)

Or if you are throwin it around xD

Maxtor are good, but unfortunately they are now owned by Seagate. Seagate is also good.