Was the hard disk making a lot of noise before it died? Did you see any bad sectors when you last ran a checkdisk utility? I remember hearing that once you get one bad sector they start spreading after a while, not sure if this is true, however.

The Boycott Starforce website used to maintain a games list, but it seems to have sailed the River Styx.

There are other lists like this one, of varying ages and completeness

A certain 'Daemon Tool' listing is likely the most complete.☺

the problem with those lists is that they are horrible outdated. the Boycott Starforce movement stopped updating their list long before it went offline.

but as grviper has said, the old SF versions were apparently never used in digital distribution.

Not sure about the noise, i was in the middle of Youtube-ing suddenly my screen gone black, can't bring the task manager. Forced to restart the PC. There were bad sectors but Windows checkdisk already detected and fixed it about 1 and a half year ago.
Damn, one of the avatar in that forum has some bouncing "physics".

These days WD is probably the best HDD manufacturer though. At least they offer the longest guarantees that I know of (five years), and the Caviar Black drive is praised pretty much everywhere.

EDIT: As a side note, I have never been able to persuade a Starforce-protected game to work. Not that I have tried very often, nor have I tried very hard to fix the issues. I now avoid all games with Starforce.

what games? i have a (small) number of Codemasters and UbiSoft games that are SF protected, and they've always worked without problems.

maybe you tried running an old SF driver on a new version of Windows and ran into a compatibility issue? older versions of SF are incompatible with W7 unless the publisher bothered to patch the game or SF (SF are apparently offering that service for free but publishers never bothered to take them up on it).

I've always found Samsung to be the most failure-prone of the hard drives out there. I've had Seagate and WD drives and most of them are still serving their time years after I bought them, but every Samsung drive I've ever had has failed after a year or two.

I agree with you that Western Digital is one of the most superior out there, but I prefer Seagate :-)

As for Starforce, I've never managed to get a Starforce protected game running under Windows 7 64-bit, even with the most recent drivers (hurrah for cracks) but I never had any real problem under XP 32-bit.

To the OP: Tried replacing your SATA cable? I've had the experience that heat inside the tower can cause a cable break.

now don't say that! i've got two Samsung HDDs totalling at 1.25TB chock-full with digital goods i cannot currently back up externally. they cannot fail me now! they must not!

like i said, it's a known compatibility issue. earlier versions of SF are incompatible with W7. nothing you can do (except for cracks) unless the respective publisher bothered to take SF up on their offer to provide them with updated drivers. apparently none of them did.

Actually, all of those things are pretty serious. Drives develop soft errors before they develop hard ones. Since you also mention having bad sectors fixed up 1-1/2 years ago, that drive was already in the last stage of its life.

Get a bootable disk test program (Western Digital's is called Data Lifeguard Tools). Run it and see whether it reports any errors on your drive.

Unfortunately, what you describe is pretty much standard end-of-life behavior for a disk. If it is a Caviar Black or Enterprise-type (model numbers with "RE") drive, it may still be under warranty, and you can contact Western Digital for a replacement. If not, it is long out of warranty, and, sad to say, you got your money's worth.

I think no chance.. Although i should know better and backup all my studies and assignment. I tested the HDD on my brother PC, still can't recognize it. Not even the BIOS detect it. I guess this is the end of the line.
So, 4 - 5 years is common lifespan for hard disk? Hopefully this time it can last little bit longer, maybe 10 years.

I only have personal experience to go by, but I find the computer requires sufficient upgrading to require a rebuild long before the HDD goes.
One of my HDD's is now 12 years old & in it's 5th case....

Hard to predict just what the useful life of any particular disk is going to be, but a large study done by Google (which uses millions of cheap drives) found annualized failure rates of 1.7 to 8.6 percent. That means, there is that much chance that a drive will fail within a year from now. Failure rate increases with the age of the drive. And if the drive has already shown a soft error, the failure rate goes up to 30-36% within 8 months.

A French study, using RMA rates from a major retailer, got similar results: first-year return rates of 1.24 to 9.71%. Certain makers (Hitachi, they call them "Deathstar" for a reason), and certain models from otherwise good makers (WD Caviar Black 2TB), accounted for most of the returns.
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/810-6/disques-durs-ssd.html
in French, translation at http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/french_retailer_data_offers_ssd_failure_rates/

Are your sure it's dead? See if it'll work with another computer. Put it in a USB plug in hard drive adapter thingy and when it's running, check if it make a faint click.
More information-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUBLx57erCY&list=UUZDA1kA3y3EIg25BpcHSpwQ&index=3&feature=plcp

The OP did that; see his most recent post.

Disk that has had previously corrected hard errors, now will not detect or boot, same failure on another computer, it's dead.

Fix'd that for you