The electronic surplus sote I go to has a big box with harddrives in it for 7.50. The guy said oh they have bad sectors and only ppl who know how to fix them buy them. So I bought one figuring I could repair the bad sectors and just stick it in my ps2 to use for memory saves, it's only 4 gb so what the hell, why not. Anyway I plug the drive up and boot my pc and it makes the like hard scratching noises and windows xp never detects the drive or anything. If it had bad sectors but could be detected, I could do a scandisk and reformat it. So since it's not detectable by XP, then I guess it's way beyond repair, correct ?

correct.

you could try putting the drive in a freezer bag and then sticking the bag in the freezer for 30 minutes. The drive should work for a few minutes, this is ony for data recovery. The drive you described sounds like it needs to be repaired.

drive is fuxxed if it makes a scratching sound, dosn't mean bad sectors means hd is done with.