bad hdd

dade

Mate asked me to look at his PC, it's running win2K SP4. anyway it wont boot or gets to the windows splash screen and freezes. Same if you try go into safe mode. HDD is an EIDE drive. not sure the capacity or make.

So I stuck in a 2K CD and tried to repair the installation. I picked the console option and tried running chkdsk /r. it get's to about 50% and I get an error "the volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems"

If i format the disk would i be right in thinking that it will skip these bad sectors? But then could it be an actual fault in the drive so even if i format it and rebuild it a few weeks down the line will it just fail again?

Is there any tools i could download and run from CD that can test the drive a little better and let me know if it's completely shagged. or will i save myself the hassle and just pick him up a new drive and rebuild the machine.

Anti

I think it would be best to get a whole new hard drive. It will save you alot of hassle down the line. Now is a good of a time as ever, as hdds are so cheap atm.

dade

was thinking that, it's a PC he got for free and I can get a decent sized disk for under €100 for him. Spoke to him just now and he said "f it just get a new one"

zilog_jones

I find badblocks in Linux more useful for checking disks for badness - any live CD should have it - you'd just run like "badblocks /dev/hda" if there's only one disk in the puter.

Be warned that if this is a pretty old PC (roughly pre-2002), there may be a physical limit of 137GB disks, unless you put in a newer ATA (or even SATA) controller card.

dade

zilog_jones wrote:

I find badblocks in Linux more useful for checking disks for badness - any live CD should have it - you'd just run like "badblocks /dev/hda" if there's only one disk in the puter.
.

it's a windows PC though and I know 0 about linux mores the pity.

Anti

If its a old pc, and not used for media then a small hard drive will be fine.

This:

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=320712 for 62€ will do fine. Or if you can find cheaper even better. And since its win 2k, i think 48bit lba will be a issue, so he will infact only see 136gb So if you can find a smaller cheaper hard drive, even better.

Although you cna get around this using a pci ide raid card. But that will add a extra 20€ ontop

Or you can use this to get around the lba issue:

http://www.48bitlba.com/enablebiglba.htm

dade

picked up an 80GB disk in Max burns today for €45 now all i got to do is spend a day rebuilding the yoke.

Capt'n Midnight

win2k means the drive is well past it's sell by date anyway.

www.hdtune.com is a handy utility to ask the drive what it thinks.