Windows Intsall

[rfleming]

Hi everyone,
My sister's computer kept crashing so i ran ad war and spyware chechs and scanned for viruses. i deleted 2 viruses then rebooted. When i rebooted it would goto the windows loading screen for 45 minutes then to the blue screen saying dumping physical memory. My friend recomended that i get files of using knoppix and then reformating. I got the files off, but now when i go to reformat it says cannot write to drive, drive may be damaged. Do i need to get a new hard drive or is there a way to fix this one?

[WhatsThisBoxFor?]

What brand is the hard drive? Try running their diagnostic software on it, and then seeing what that says. If the drive is under warranty you should be able to get a replacement if it failed.

[rfleming]

it is a dell, its warranty ran out about 4 months ago, and i dont believe it can with any diagnostic software. i just tried from the recovery console chkdsk c: /r and it says it has found errors but they cannot be repaired.

[WhatsThisBoxFor?]

If you still want to run the diagnostics, and are prepared to open the case, you can look at the brand on the hard drive and then run diagnostics for it, you can download them off the manufacturers site.

But to me, since chkdsk finds errors, and windows cannot be installed, it sounds like the hard drive is bad and needs to be replaced. Diagnostics might reveal more details, but I expect the drive will need to be replaced (although sometimes a zero fill can get rid of some types of errors, or might be able to repair it.)

[rfleming]

ok the drive is a toshiba. i belive the model number is HHd2181 or MK3021KAS.
i cant seem to find anything on the website though.

[WhatsThisBoxFor?]

Well apparently Toshiba has not made a diagnostic utility for their drives, but apparantly one from a different brand will work (depending on the program).

Take a look at this list, http://www.techspot.com/vb/showthrea...&threadid=7602
You should be able to use Maxtors or IBM's to run diags on the drive.

[rfleming]

thanks for the link, i will try them now.

[rfleming]

Do any of them run off cd? The laptop doesnt have a floppy drive

[glc]

Toshiba laptop drives are crap. Don't even bother with diagnostics - buy a new drive. The hot tip for laptop drives these days is Seagate. They have very affordable 5400 rpm 8mb cache drives that are totally silent and have a 5 year warranty.

[Statica]

Some laptops have a supervisor and a usermode for the hard drives in the BIOS, have you tried changing it to supervisor mode?

[rfleming]

We gave up on fixing it and just bought a new hard drive. Thanks for your help though.