well, I personally have never opened up a hard drive, if nothing else because I've never had an extra to pop open (i'm too frugal. hehe.) Regardless, I have found the program "Spinrite" to work great on IDE drives; it goes through and can fix bad sectors, or mark them totally unusable. this really differs from standard formats/etc, because I've been able to take drives w/ 30mb of bad sectors and get it to 0 bad sectors, and still running fine w/ no problems after a year. i believe they are on version 5, i got version 4 for about 20 bucks. This is kind of off-topic and doesn't cover a whole lot of you out there, but when you buy a box of 100 drives that are all "bad", you can sometimes salvage quite a few of them. -Eric