Is my hard drive salvageable?

[grrl]

I have an old laptap that just took a knock. Now the HD has some damage on the platter. It runs fine once it manages to run through a VERY long but incomplete scandisk process. Once I got into Windows I ran scandisk again hoping it could mark the bad sectors and that would be all, but it froze up at one of the really bad spots. I've tried scandisk again from a boot disk, but it quits at the same point.

Is the drive a bust or is there another program I can try that will mark the bad sectors so the machine can boot up quickly?

 

[Spydermag68]

It sounds like the HD is toast. Once a hard drive starts having bad sectors showing up every time you run scan disk it is time to get a new one.

 

[zepper00]

There is a program called SpinRite that can really save the bacon, but it's not cheap. Gibson Research Good luck.
.bh.

 

[JustinLerner]

SpinRite only works in DOS with FAT file systems, so if you are using Window 2000/XP with NTFS (which is much bettern than FAT) and not FAT16 or FAT32, you will need to format in FAT, then use something like SpinRite.

Finally, even if you choose to SpinRit, you will have to cross your fingers and hope that the problem will be fixed (hoping that the problem is not an inherent hardware failure, but just errors or bad blocks).
--
Since the first response also was perceptive enough to notice that errors occur each time you reboot, there is a high possibility that your HD is failing. If you had errors at different places each time you ran scandisk, this would indicate a failiing HD.

So unless you want to guess whether or not you have failing hardware or just bad blocks/errors, I would suggest buying a new laptop drive from any place with decent prices, like at the following URL's

$71.00 -- 10GB bare drive, 4200 rpm, IBM Travelstar (2.5")

$101.00 -- 20GB bare drive, 5400 rpm, IBM Travelstar (2.5")