Problem with Win XP (Help if you can)

[farmercal]

I am running Window XP Pro and it has been working like a champ with a few errors here and there but nothing really bad until now. I shut down and rebooted and when it rebooted it did a scan disk(?) and said it found a bad cluster on an .mp3 file and fixed it. Then it went through the check and all folders checked out fine. It then began the free disk space check and moves right along until it gets to the 40% mark and at that point the hard drive sounds like it is in a never ending loop. The only way I can boot is to bypass this disk check. Once I bypass this disk check everything seems to load and operate just fine. XP informed the the disk does not require defragmentation at this time so what can I do to fix the disk problem? (if that is what it is)

I have the following components before you ask:

AMD 1800+ CPU
Shuttle AK35GTR motherboard
256 Meg of Corsair DDR 2100 RAM
60 GIG Seagate Barricuda IV hard drive
Yamaha 3200EZ burner
LiteOn 52X CDROM

My hard drive is hooked up to the primary IDE connection and my burner and CDROM are hooked up to the secondary.

Cal

P.S. Would disk restore be my best course of action and if I did that does it change data files? What I mean is will I loose any information or favorites added lately? I was under the assumption the disk restore only restored system information.

 

[corkyg]

All your symptoms point to a bad cluster on your HDD - not usually repairable. The old fix would be to map that out of your drive so it virtually does not exist. When your Chkdsk utility gets to that point, it appears to hang or loop, but what it is doing is making repeated attempts to read/repair that cluster. Are you in NTFS or FAT32 on that drive?

It might be possible to fix it with Gibson SpinRite 5 (makes its own boot disk and does a non-destructive low level format at selectable depths) where it would map that area out of your HDD.

 

[Renob]

Me thinks corky*g is right.
Good luck, fixing it.

 

[farmercal]

corky-g its FAT32. I have only had this up for a week and the drive is brand new. Should I try to format it, reload and then attempt a scan disk? Also would Partition Magic 7 be able to fix this problem? I bought the program with the intention of making a boot partition and then read that one partition was better so never used it. Windows XP is running fine it's just that I can't do a Scan Disk without it hanging and forcing me to reboot and skip the scan disk. If it's a bad hard drive I need to find out now so I can RMA it. Should I be using NTFS instead of FAT 32?

 

[corkyg]

I'm not sure that NTFS is any better at mapping out a bad sector than FAT32 is. But, FAT32 may be easier to fix. If you have tried everything with FAT32, it would be worth a try to convert to NTFS. That would be less traumatic than a reformat, etc.

Reformatting usually destroys all virtual bad sector areas, but then it is supposed to remap it.

Yes, it would be possible to make the drive usable with Partition Magic, but you would have to know exactly where the bad sector is. Then you can partition up to it and right after it and leave a small area free around it - sort of a brute force manual remapping operation.

I would really try SpinRite 5.0 in this case. Prior to XP, Norton Disk Doctor would do a pretty good job of mapping out bad sectors. It is a very slow process - a thorough SpinRite job would at best be an overnite operation at Level 5. ScanDisk was replaced in XP by ChkDsk, and it only works at the Command Prompt.

SpinRite