Bad Hard Drive????

[imbest123]

I have a 30Gb Maxtor hard drive and I tried isntalling Red Hat 9. Once it was done Red Hat would just restart on the boot up so I tried installing Windows XP back on it. It would give me this error that I couldnt format the HD back to NTFS so I tried reinstalling Red Hat on it and it said it couldnt because there was an error installing kernel-2.4.20.8. I have tried zero-filling the HD with the utility from maxtor.com but i still get the same error. Does anyone know whatis wrong or is it a bad HD?

[Panama Red]

Do you have Partition Magic and another XP machine you can put it in as a slave? I was able to save a hdd a while back that was acting similarly. First try the Disk Management in XP, and if that won't work, try PM. Also, you can run a good diagnostic program at Western Digital that will work with all manufacturers' hdd's. It's the online version. Again, you'll need it installed as slave in another operating system.

[imbest123]

Well I had it connected on slave the whole time. I jsut recently took out my other hd and put this one in as master but its messed up. Ive also tried putting it back as slave and using Partition Magic but it says that there is an error.

[Panama Red]

Here's the WD test link, if you're interested.

http://support.wdc.com/dlg/onlinedlg.asp

[imbest123]

Thank you Panama Red but will this work with a Maxtor hard drive?

[Panama Red]

yup!

[not important]

THis is also a very HDD zeroing tool.
http://www.killdisk.com/