Hard drive problem? What's your opinion?

[TeeRex]

My brother in-law brought me a custom pc that someone built for him, and it seems to be having a problem.

This is what happens: The computer goes on, it posts, everything checks out okay, but when it starts to load windows it reboots. It gets as far as the first windows xp windows and then just craps out. It just keeps doing it over and over.

Anyway, I was going to try to format the drive and reinstall windows, so I booted to dos, and the computer doesn't recognize the c: drive. Then I tried booting to the CDROM windows cd, and it gave me a blue screen of death when it tried to write to the hard drive. So now I suspect the hard drive having gone bad.

Turns out, when I opened it up, that the hard drive had screws only on one side, so it was lopsided. Any bump could have caused the bottom of the hard drive to touch the chassis of the case.

I also tried pulling it out and installing it as a slave on another computer and that computer crashed when it tried to read it.

My only thought is that it's a dead hard drive. Any other thoughts?

[mikezel]

Do you mean that there were only screws holding the hard drive to the chassis on one side, or the hard drive itself was only screwed together on one side?

FWIW, it sounds to me like that drive is probably toast, but you could try downloading the diagnostic tools from the manufacturers website, and try them from outside of Windows.

mike

[TeeRex]

I mean that out of four screws that usually hold the hard drive in place, only to were there. Both on one side, so the hard drive dangled. My thought is that it could have been damaged because of that.

[mikezel]

Ok, its very possible that this is what damaged your drive. My recommendation would be to go to the manufacturer's website, download the diagnostic tools, which will allow you to save them to a bootable disk. Boot from this disk, run the tools, and it will tell you what sort of shape the drive is in.

mike

[TeeRex]

Will do when I get home, thanks.

[Spools]

I was having the exact same problems on my machine. I was getting BSODs during normal work and then varying error messages. After ruling out the most notorious components (RAM, PSU, etc), I tried running a repair install of XP. While trying to copy the installation files, various files wouldn't copy over.

After working through all other possibilities, I installed XP on another HDD without issue and it's been running great since.

[TeeRex]

Just wanted to follow up. I ran the diagnostic utility from Maxtor, and it determined that the hard drive had bad sectors. Also it was able to fix them, albeit at the expense of losing the information on the drive. I formatted it, and reinstalled windows. Now it seems to run fine. I hope it doesn't happen again though. Thanks again for the help!

[mikezel]

No problem. Glad to see it worked out for you.

[cmillar6]

bad sectors tend to come back, I would replace the harddrive.

[Cricket]

Yeah, bad sectors tend to multiply over time and you'll start to get problems again with that hard drive. It can get so bad that the hard drive becomes totally useless.

If it's still under the warranty period I would try to RMA it back to Maxtor.

Cricket

[TeeRex]

I'll keep that in mind. If it happens again, I'll just go ahead and get a new hard drive.

So far though it seems allright. Although just last night right in the middle of windows it just rebooted, reminiscent of the original problem. After the reboot windows gave me a message saying that it had 'just recovered from a serious problem'.

Doesn't inspire much hope, but since it's been running fine. Just got to keep an eye on it I guess.

Thanks again.

[submaster]

bad sector could not fix. it would happen again.( if you have any hard drive got bad sector , just use it to copy datebases...