How do I determine if my hard drive is really dead?

How do I determine if my hard drive is really dead? I am a high school student, and I basically do simple troubleshooting and attempt to fix things when things go wrong. As my experience is based on real problems, my teacher asked me to attempt to fix this hard disk drive that is considered "dead".
Asked by: Guest \| Views: 403

Total answers/comments: 1

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bert [Entry]

"Some thoughts ...

1- Assuming you are correctly interpreting the startup issues to the hard drive, I would consider it dead and do something interesting with it.

2- Since you are using SpinRite (which I HIGHLY recommend), perhaps you could get more technical info from the SpinRite newsgroup. A webportal to it is here. You might find more info there, although digging will be required since there is no search.

3- I would consider Dave Drager's recommendation that you remove the repaired drives from service. If you can't, back them up frequently. As drives age the errors start to come more quickly."