Is my hard disk drive dying?

[krushstone]

Recently I got some problems with my computer.

My sister was using it and she got 3 bsod in about 10 minutes, and they were all about
KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR.
(the computer is using windows 2k)

But now, things are worse. It doesn't even boot. When Windows is loading (after the loading screen with black background), I get a blue screen about INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE
heck! sure it accessible, where are you booting from? (I have only one hdd in this computer.)

So I think that is the hard drive that is faulty. What do you think about that?
The only other hardware that can be faulty would be the new ram stick that I put in it 2 weeks ago(removing the old stick). The ram was detected at its right capacity, and I even ran memtester (something like that) and the ram was ok. And the computer was running fine after the upgrade.

Also, I needed to reset the bios. I didn't write down the hdd info, but it seems that the bios is detecting it correctly (right size).
Could an incorrectly configured hdd works only sometimes? Because it did work a couple of day ago with the same settings...

I just don't want to buy a new hdd if I don't need to...

Thanks for your help

Martin

 

[Theslowone]

Do you know the namebrand of the hdd, if so go to their website and they should have a fitness test for your drive.

 

[AKA]

You need to try the Repair option off the Win2K cd first before you start assuming its the hard drive.

Do you have a startup disk? Try it and see if you can see the hard disk at all.

 

[krushstone]

Ok

first I tried to repair windows. I booted from the CD, but windows couldn't detect an installation on the drive...

After, I tried to test the computer with ONTRACK Data Advisor.

The results are:

Lecteur 1 (QUANTUM FIREBALLP LM10.2)
Etat SMART lu : A réussi
Test 90 secondes : A réussi
Test de structure de fichiers : non gérée (because it's ntfs)
L'analyse complète de la surface : Réussi, avec des erreur(s) mineure(s)
Enregistrement 82, Erreur E/S
Enregistrement 15404, Erreur E/S
Enregistrement 10035248, Erreur E/S
Enregistrement 10036800, Erreur E/S
Enregistrement 10038447, Erreur E/S

Sorry if it's in French... English translation would be

Drive 1 (QUANTUM FIREBALLP LM10.2)
SMART Status Check: OK
90 seconds test : OK
File structure Test: Not supported (because it's ntfs)
Complete Surface Scan: OK, with marginal errors
Sector 82, I/O Error
Sector 15404, I/O Error
Sector 10035248, I/O Error
Sector 10036800, I/O Error
Sector 10038447, I/O Error


5 deffectives sectors.

From what I know about HDD, a new hard disk has spare sectors. When it detects that a sector is bad, it marks it as bad so it won't use it anymore and remap it to one of the spare sector. So, no deffective sectors should be detected by software.
The only way a software can detect deffective sectors is when all the spare sectors are used, so there are already a buch of defective sectors.

Am I right?

If I am, I definatly need a new disk drive...

 

[kjwise]

You should get another HD, you can reformat this hd so the next format will mark the bad sectors and use it for general storage.