Problem with slowing older drive

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

I have 250gb caviar SE drive from about 5 years ago. Last week, I turned on my computer and it wouldn’t boot. Any attempt to reinstall windows XP was met with a “bad pool caller” bsod. I bought a small SSD and installed windows on it, thinking I could use the older drive for storage.

My explorer kept hanging and crashing whenever it access files or tried to transfer files to/from the older drive. I noticed that if I copied small files and kept the total size under about 30 mb, it would transfer quickly. But if I tried copying a bunch of files, or even just one file over 30mb, it would take forever. I spent a few days trying to find a solution, but was unable.

So I went out and bought a caviar blue, and now I have the SSD, Caviar Blue and Caviar SE all hooked up. The old drive is still slow, but it works. I was wondering if anyone had ideas on how to use it or fix it. Thanks.

2

This is what I’d do:

  • replace cables (both power and data).

  • run a surface scan of the whole hd - MHDD is my preffered method

  • if nothing comes up on the surface scan and no important data is found on the drive, run a complete wipe (zero-fill) on the hard disk

3

I replaced the both cables and loaded MHDD through DOS. I could not run the surface scan because it said, “drive not ready.” I looked on their forum, but the I couldn’t understand the troubleshooting.

I ran the WD lifeguard diagnostic tool and started to zero-fill the disk, but it show 110 hours remaining and after an hour or so, the progress bar had not moved at all, so I aborted. I ran a quick scan with no errors in about 6 minutes, and then an extended scan in about 77 minutes also with no errors.

The disk has served me faithfully, but I think it is time to throw it away. Thank you for your help.