My 2 year old 60Gb went out a couple of months ago and I've been trying since then occasionally to get the data off it. It just clicks a lot and cycles down then up, like it's trying to calibrate to read the sector properly. About 15% of the sectors went bad all at once.
Sounds terminal doesn't it? Well, this morning I low level formatted it to get rid of all the remaining data before I sent it off for replacement.
Drive works fine now. Absolutely no bad sectors at all. And it still has 100% of its capacity available, it's not just that the LL format quietly remapped the bad sectors out of sight.
One theory I saw was that one of the heads was writing while it was moving across the platter. This guy made a graph showing where his bad sectors were, and they made the pattern of a spiral.
So it's probable that my drive is 100% mechanically sound, but there's some nasty firmware bug waiting to spray white-out over part of it again. I can't return it now since it's a "perfectly" working drive.
