What's the absolute best way to fix an erroneous drive?

Hi again guys. I have a beloved Toshiba 2.5" Laptop drive. It's damaged kind of bad because my sister never ever shut her laptop down properly. She'd just hold down the power button and wouldn't care what damage it did or that she had to go through an extra prompt screen at boot up.

Point is, I'd like to fix this drive and I've been searching around the net pretty hard for a few days. I've tried things such as a 'Zero Fill' from Hd Tune Pro's options. I've tried running Spinrite on the disc which only seemed to make more errors come up in HD Tune pro. I've tried a regular windows error scan with an automatically fix bad sectors. I've tried everything. Spinrite seems to have damaged the disc more than it ever was which I find sort of hard to believe. I even tried a 3 day zero-fill low-level-format using Killdisc etc. and another program.

I need to know if there is a really good method in steps or a really good program that can pretty much refresh a drive. I am not talking about something that fixes it completely but I really want this drive to stay alive. I don't want to buy a new one and I don't mind if the software costs me more than a new drive would. I've spent quite a bit as it is already.

So if anyone is familiar or has experience in a way or set of steps or knows good software then please share your experiences. I'd love to know and see if I can get this baby running better again. It holds data pretty well even if I cover the whole thing and copy from one drive to another. I don't get any read or write errors but HD Tune Pro says the drive is pretty sick :/

 

Had same issue with my daughter's laptop - you're on borrowed time. Best to replace - even if can find some software to do some sort of "magic", it will fail sooner or later and then your problems only get worse.

 

You can't fix a hardware fault using software. If chkdisk and formatting doesn't help, there is probably no way to fix it short of disassembly (which requires a clean room).

 

Yep, the only thing to do is replace the drive (though you will want to be backing up important data now: such as files, settings, program installers, and bookmarks)

hdd's are generally very reliable, but those power downs don't help anything, and once a drivestarts going bad, there's no fix

 

Wow that's really sad to hear.. I guess there really is no way around it :<

I'll try a basic Chkdsk. I haven't tried that but I guess if something is broken then sometimes it's just best to get a new one.

 

Should have configured Windows so pressing the power button does shut down the computer properly.

 

Thats impossible, unfortunately. Pressing it may shut it down, but holding still will shut it down the bad way, on every computer.

 

Every time you run something that reads/writes on a drive with damaged platters, the damaged area grows as the head touches the damaged surface.

 

Like someone said, that's not possible. I did set it to do that. After awhile of my sister being impatient the computer would just freeze every-so-often as the drive failed more and more and eventually that caused her to do it even more often.

That's worse than a virus but it's nice to know. :/