I'm not sure if this is hardware or software, but here goes...
About a year and a half ago, a 2 terabyte hard drive, Western Digital Caviar Green, had stopped working. At the time, I wasn't entirely sure it was "dead dead." The first time it lost data was back in March 2011, and I suspect the partition tables were screwed up. At the time, I only had Partition Magic available to me, and with it being such an old program, it may not be fully compatible with this large a drive. When PM loaded the drive, it would show a table error, though I forget which number. Thinking it may not be truly dead, I just disconnected it and let it sit in my desktop for the next 2 years. What further lead me to believe that this particular drive was probably ok is that an 80 GB drive, which was the active drive, did ultimately fail, or at least Windows XP up and croaked since it would no longer boot.
Fast forward to today, and I decide to put this 2TB drive in my enclosure, and see if I could just reformat it and hope it works A-OK. Windows does recognize that a hard drive exists, but any access on it is extremely delayed. It usually takes some 4-5 minutes before what you try to do is executed. Windows explorer reports it as 0 bytes free, 0 bytes capacity.
I guess the big question is, if the partition tables are screwed up, could I rebuild them? If so, how? Otherwise, am I in possession of a 2 terabyte paper weight?