In article , B00ze
wrote:

Got a 15 years old WD IDE hard drive, that was showing ZERO problems in
SMART data, suddenly can no longer calibrate (i.e. it can't read
anymore.) NOW the SMART data is showing something's wrong.

what specifically is smart showing? do you have more than a pass/fail?

Calibrate and Read, they're both like 1 or 2 (out of 100 or 199 or
whatever) - it can't read, spinning-up is fine. The drive shows-up in
Windows, so the interface to the computer works fine, but since it can't
read, Windows keeps freezing-up. It's still running in that old
computer, I just disabled it in the BIOS for now.

try it on a non-windows system.

if you don't have a non-windows system available, try spinrite:
https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm