Hard Drive disaster help required

hi all

the other day my brother reported to me that he was having trouble with his computer he told me that he couldn't repatriation and reformat his drive despite following the guide that I made for him now at first I though maybe he's just doing something wrong and I had a go with no joy then I noticed that S.M.A.R.T wasn't enabled to I went in to bios and enabled smart saved my settings and exited

upon exiting S.M.A.R.T interrupted the restart with the error that the drive was bad

so what id like to know is how I can get his drive working again at least enough so that he can use his computer until such time as we can afford to buy a new hard drive ?

now I heard of GRCs Spinrite so I decided that id like to try because I figured if it can fix the drive then its well worth buying a copy so search the net to see if I could find somewhere I could download a copy which I did the copy I found was version 6 release 1 which I presume is the latest version correct me if I'm wrong

but I'm having no joy I created a Spinrite floppy and restarted his computer and then it started up and gave me the message that SMART was reporting the drive as bad and as such should only be run in mode 2 I then confirmed this message and proceeded to the drive selection screen selected his drive and hit enter to begin check but the problem is that its not working

it gets to 00.002% and wont go any further even after leaving it for several hours see I set it running in the evening then went to bed but when I came back down in the morning it was still at 00.002% and the running time on the clock was still showing 00:04 even though the program had been running for several hours

so I decided to try it with an old hard 2gb drive I had lying round from a Pentium 1 comp because i figured if I could get this drive going then at least he would have a working computer still I can sort his main drive

but the trouble is that I'm having the same problem with this drive as the first the scan wont complete it gets to like 5% and wont go any further and the running clock stays at 00:03 even after being left to run for several hours

so my next though was to try running it on the family computer which I know has nothing wrong with it so I inserted the disk booted up set it to run in mode 4 maintance mode which the timer reported would take about 24 hours so I left it running though out the day and the next morning the scan had completed

so I though that maybe the reason the other 2 drives wouldn't complete is because they had insufficient ram so 1 at a time I hooked both drives up to the family computer that has 512mb dd ram and attempted to scan the drives again I ran in to the same problem the scan wouldn't complete

so now I'm really stuck and in need of some help

 

Do you smell some thing bad coming from nowhere when you connect it. I think the drive is dying and draining too much power such that the power supply can't cop with it. Don’t push on that drive too much if you have some important data on it. Hook it in place of your CDROM. NOT SLAVED WITH THE MAIN DRIVE. make sure master/slave is correct and try to copy the important data from it. Install "speedfan" http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php
And check "S.M.A.R.T" tab and see the condition of the HD. Do not do any mentinance if SMART report is bad. REPLACE IT SOON BEFORE YOU LOOSE EVERY THING.

 

hi

i dont really have anything important on the drive i was just hopeing that i could salvage this one and that buying a replacment wouldnt be nessery

becaue my bro cant offord a new drive right now which is leaving him without a working computer