Hard drive failure? Please help!

[Xerin2]

My pc has worked fine since I built it a few months back. However, today it started rebooting randomly and eventually reached the point where I couldn't get to the Windows XP desktop even in safe mode.

I tried reinstalling XP. The bios detected the hard drive just fine, and XP told me I had to reformat the drive for the installation. So I reformatted but then was told that XP couldn't copy any files to the drive.

Don't most hard drive failures result in the drive being undetectable from the bios? Do I need a new hard drive? Any help is much appreciated!

 

[ttn1]

The easy answer to the first question is no. Drives fail in all sorts of crazy ways. Usually driving you nuts in the process.

The only thing I would suggest is possibly a low level format. Check your drive manufacturers website for diagnostic tools.

If I were you, I would hesitate to use this drive for any critical operations. I would probably get another drive and use this one as a
secondary drive for non-critical stuff. That is if you have the money to make this suggestion an option.

Otherwise, run all the diagnosticas and low-level format utilities you can find. Maybe one will work.

 

[sublime79]

Totally agree with ttn1. I had a HD that crashed on me about a year ago. It would try to format and had an uber amount of bad sectors. The software from the company (I think it was Quantum) wouldn't even acknowledge the drives existance. Thankfully it was under warranty and I got a replacement free (well, except for the 5 or 6 bucks it costed to ship the drive back to them) Good luck.