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Think I have a hdd failing.

P

P0ldy

Senior member
On my old computer,

Athlon XP 1500+
GeForce 2
Biostar mobo
256MB PC2100
60GB WD hdd
2 Opticals

Three Windows installs have been corrupted in the past two months. Last night I reinstalled again, and this morning the same issue has come up. When starting any program, be it Firefox or Word, a vague error message comes up, "such and such is not a valid
Windows image please check against your installation diskette."

All of the abovelisted hardware is more than four years old. I'm thinking it's either the RAM or the hdd. Would bad sectors be the cause of this on the hdd? And what diagnostic tool would you recommend? I'm about to run memtest on it to check the RAM's errors, but would that take out whole Windows installs?

TIA.
 
Bad RAM could be the cause of many problems. I'd start with a Memtest scan and see what you find.

You might try looking on the drive manufacturer website and see what tools they have available for drive scanning. Alternatively, you could check out some of the free tools on the Ultimate Boot CD (highly recommended download, IMHO).

http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/

Is SMART enabled in the BIOS?
 
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