Hard drive failure!

[maXroOt]

So I put a new p4 chip and asus motherboard into my computer yesterday. i boot up, and windows gives me a message saying i need to reactive it within a few days cause i made major hardware changes, but then the computer just freezes. i hard boot it, and the comp never makes it to the windows splash screen. i got an error saying there was some system files that were missing, and that i needed to repair it. i tried to repair, failed, so figured i would reformat (i have a 40 gig and a 120 gig, the 40 is for the OS, programs, and other stuff. so it isnt a big deal to reformat that one as long as i dont have to touch the 120 since that has all the important data on it). i try to reformat the 40, and i get an error! it goes through the nfts format screen, gets to 100%, and then says that it cant install windows on that partition! i tried rebooting, etc, and still had the same problem. then i decided to try linux (mandrake 9.0) and it worked! i am on linux right now and everything worked fine. but alas, i need to go back to windows, any ideas why my harddrive is crapping out? im afraid if i try to reformat it again, i will lose linux and then have to reinstall it again. any ideas here? its pretty weird

 

[Unforgiven]

i had the exact same thing happen with a laptop hard drive recently and the only way i could get it to format using fdisk (or using the windows cd for that matter) was to use Boot & Nuke first then after that was completed i could format normally. i dont know what the hell happened but Boot & Nuke fixed whatever issue that was going on.


Darik's Boot & Nuke

 

[maXroOt]

cool, thanx I will try it after my last class today.

 

[cbehnken]

I've seen this on several new drives. Try the NTFS quick format and it should work fine. I think there is a bug in Windows Setup...

 

[maXroOt]

I already tried that, didnt work

 

[cbehnken]

I'm going to guess that there may be a bad/weak sector around the boot area then. I wouldn't trust the drive even if you get it formatted.

 

[Unforgiven]

any update on this by any chance?