Bad Hard Drive?

[echidna-tan]

Issue: My old hard drive doesn't appear in disk management but in BIOS it shows up with no name and with 0 GB.

Full Description of Situation: My desktop was just given to me by my brother last year and it is kind of old. I enjoyed using it though until now. I tried cleaning it and I was surprised when i saw a unconnected drive in the caddy alongside my current hard drive. I connected an extra SATA power cable and SATA data cable and tried to make it a secondary drive. I had my doubts since It probably was not used for a long time. When I turned on my computer, the BIOS splash screen took longer to load than usual and the windows OS in my primary drive also took longer before appearing.The hard drive is Spinning because I can feel the vibration however I dont feel any heat and It only vibrates when I do a disk check in BIOS set up and unfortunately I didn't saw the drive in computer folder, disk management and data life guard diagnostic(since the drive I found was from Western Digital, I tried to use this). However, In my attempt to make it work as much as I can, I checked in the BIOS Set-up and I saw there that my secondary drive was present but It had no model number and shows 0 gigabyte as its capacity, unlike my primary drive which has it's model number and shows the right capacity.
I already tried switching power cable and data cable with the primary drive but It didn't change anything.

My Question: Is this hard drive bad? Is it worth it to repair? How do I dispose of it, In case it's bad?

Specs: Secondary drive - WD Caviar Blue 160 gb

Thank you very much.

 

[Herc08]

You need to try to get into a Windows Preinstallation Environment and runa chkdsk on the hard drive. Also try to format it using diskpart. You may not need to boot out of Windows, but it will make sure everything is good and not really using resources except the USB or DVD drive.

 

[JaredDM]

Has it failed - Yes, it sounds like the HDD has failed. It's very typical for WDs to show 0Gb capacity when they have failed. There's no sense running Chkdsk as Herc08 suggested as the drive has no LBA access (something chkdsk depends on).

Is it worth it to repair? Only if you need data back off of it, which it doesn't sound like you do. Data recovery from a drive like that will usually cost a minimum or $400-500 and could be higher. A 160Gb used HDD has a value of about $10, and a failed drive is never really fixed, it only patched up enough to extract data.

How do you dispose of it? - If you're concerned about data security since you don't know what's contained on the drive, then you'll want to be sure it's properly disposed of. You can destroy it yourself by simply drilling a few holes through it or removing the platters and bashing them good with a hammer to bend them. Or you can take the more earth friendly approach and send it somewhere like this: Free HDD Wiping Service

They'll wipe the drive and keep the parts to use for data recovery work.