Hard Drive

Zeroing the drive is suitable for light damage, as in one or two bad sectors found on an entire drive. You don't have light damage, you have massive damage. I think if you read a little more carefully it explains why that (likely) won't work - you'll run out of spare sectors if you even have any left at all.

Let's play baseball!:

1. Apple failed your drive. Strike one.
2. Scannerz failed your drive. Strike two.
3. Your drive's already 6 years old. Strike three. Your out.

You can try to zero it if you want but I think your just wasting your time and possibly deluding yourself.

Take it apart and see what's inside... hard drives are really cool on the inside!

Clinton

If you want to see if the old drive will continue working, look at your test results, put the drive into an external enclosure, and repartition it into three sections:

1. First good partition
2. Second partition containing bad data
3. Third good partition

Once all 3 partitions are created, delete the one with the bad data.

Example: Suppose your bad data runs from 50G to75G on a 160G HD. Then:

Partition 1: 0GB-50GB

Partition 2: 50GGGB - 75GB

Partition 3: 75GGB - 160GB

Create all three of them using Disk Utility, then delete partition 2. The bad data will be excluded from visibility and access.

Depending on the damage to your drive, it may continue to work on Partitions 1 and 3 for some time. If the damage is from a one time severe head crash, it might work. If it's because the internal drive mechanisms are wearing out, the problems will just continue to get worse and worse.

I wouldn't trust such a drive with critical data, but it could be used to hold junk like old games....things you'd like to keep around but the world won't end if it's lost.

Here's another tip, but this time it's regarding hard drives, external hard drives in particular:

If you decide to not to tear the drive apart, make sure that you at least do something to destroy any recoverable data on it that might be of value. A friend of mine bought a bad external drive on ebay because he needed the external power supply from the unit. When he got it, he opened the case up and found the drive was in perfect working order. The owner assumed since the entire unit apparently wasn't working, clearly the drive wasn't working either. WRONG!!! If my friend was a crook, he probably would have scoured the drive for every bit of personal information he could have gotten off the drive. Instead, he reformatted it and put it back into use. :-)

Moral of the story is make sure you're drive is clear of data, or really unrecoverable before getting rid of it.

I've decided to go with the 500GB HGST 7200RPM drive recommended by Clintonofbirmingham. The price at OWC is more than reasonable. I can't find any posts by anyone putting HGST drives down.

Just as an FYI, a local store here was selling Western Digital My Book 2TB drivves for about $70. The price seemed cheap so we got one.

WOW! What a piece of junk! Back in the days when I was working on Linux systems WD used to be a "primo" brand. Here's a list of my problems/complaints:

1. When you look at the photo of the unit on the box, it looks like it's going to be made out of machined metal with a black coating. It isn't metal, it's cheap plastic, like the type of plastic used in model air planes.
2. Half the controls on it don't work unless you install Western Digital's backup drive software. If you don't do this, the ON-OFF switch won't work and some of the lights won't work. If you install this software, which has had compatibility issues, it immediately starts indexing your drives and preparing for a backup.
3. The cable is cheap and flimsy
4. The drive is slower than molasses.

We opened one up to look at it. Basically what they do is put a stryrene like plastic case around a 3.5" low power variable spindle rate hard drive. The thing looks like something a 14 year old would put together.

I've seen a few people put out warnings about WD's stuff on this site. I never really paid any attention to them. I think from now on I will.

As an FYI and heads up to anyone currently using or considering using a Western Digital hard drive, yesterday I received an e-mail from Western Digital telling me not to use their drive with their drivers (the add on software I was talking about above) with Mavericks. The drive/software combination can end up destroying or losing all the data on the drive. I've seen this reported on other web sites.

My own personal take on external drives is this: If they need drivers or add-on software to function properly with a Mac, stay away from them.

This is a perfect example of WHY that's a problem. The drivers the hardware relies on aren't compatible with the new OS.

I don't own a WD, but haven't been hearing much good about them. For kicks I went to their site to see what they had about the problem you described. I figured there would be some type of notice on the front page, but you had to search through the downloads section to find it.

Here's a link:

http://community.wd.com/t5/News-Announcements/External-Drives-for-Mac-Experienci ng-Data-Loss-with-Maverick-OS/m-p/613777#M379

I hate to play devil's advocate in what seems to be emerging as a

"Western Digital BAAAAAAD....HGST GOOOOOOOOD"

discussion, and I hate to burst the pipe dreams of any fantasy islanders out there, but Western Digital owns HGST.

Link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital

Quote from article:

In March 2011, Western Digital agreed to acquire the storage unit of Hitachi, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, for about $4.3 billion of which $3.5 billion was paid in cash and the rest with 25 million shares of Western Digital.^[11]

I've personally observed some drive configurations failing with Mavericks. One of our systems has a Core Storage configuration used to span 2 drives, one an internal drive the other one attached via FireWire. This is not to make a "Fusion" drive, this is to be able to take advantage of volume spanning (i.e. making two disks into one big mega disk). The system also has ML on it.

In any case, instead of committing to Mavericks, we decided to put it on yet another FireWire drive just to test drive it. Every time the Mavericks FW drive is selected as a boot drive the system goes through the following sequence:

1. During initial boot up the system crashes throwing CPU register contents on the screen.
2. The system then restarts
3. The system then provides a multi-language statement saying the system had crashed..press a key to re-start.
4. The system will then boot into Mavericks.

...sort of an archaic way of booting an OS.😉 After looking at the stack trace provided in the feedback report being sent to Apple, it became clear the exceptions were being thrown when the Core Storage IOKit drivers were being loaded. To test this hypothesis, I disconnected the FireWire component of the Core Storage unit from the FireWire chain and rebooted. The theory here was that because the Core Storage unit couldn't be identified in it's entirety because part of it was missing, the Core Storage kexts wouldn't be loaded. The trick worked because now we can get the Mavericks unit to boot as long as the Core Storage unit's aren't complete and the CS drivers don't load. Once the CS drivers load, this problem is as repeatable as the sun coming up in the morning.

....I guess my rather long winded point is that Mavericks is having some problems with drives, and they're not necessarily limited to Western Digital. This problem could be replicated with anything.,

I don't think that Western Digital's owning HGST currently has any effect on the HGST product lines quality. IMHO WD just needs to clean up it's act a bit and it should or at least could become a good company again.

The WD problem appears to be with software drivers included with WDs external hard drives. I've been using WD HDs for a long time .... raw hard drives that is.... and have yet to have any problems. Unless someone can prove this company is really inferior with some actual data I'm going to be skeptical about all the "Western Digital is the worst company on Earth stuff."