if you have bad sectors on the hard disk, you'll need to low-level format it.

I would keep a lookout on the hard disk. Developing bad sectors are a sign of failure.

Umm....how do I low level format it? Is it changing the NTFS file system to FAT32?? I recently installed my OS because it was unstable whne these bad sectors were found.

No, it is much more thorough than formatting through Windows. It basically writes "0" to every user-accessible sector of the drive.

This type of formatting is often not enough to repair bad sectors, but it can hide them... and as long as no new ones pop up, you'll be okay.

To repair bad sectors, you may also want to try HDD Regenerator (listed in the first part of this thread). It's not free though and isn't guaranteed to work (although it really does a great job with most problems I've encountered).

I would suggest buying a new drive instead. Developing new bad sectors is a sign of failure and you're in for a major headache later on. 80GB drives are going for around $50. 200GB drives are only $100. And with rebate specials etc... the price goes even lower. There really aren't any good excuses to keep your drive unless your computer is really, really old or you are entirely unable to spend any money at all.

The type of low-level formatting that Rick and possibly others has described is very important. What you have to do is get the make and perhaps even the model of your hard drive, with that info you go to your hard drive mfgrs website and download the diagnostic program. This prog ends up on a floppy and works in dos. You can use a win98 boot disk (even If you have win xp installed) as it works from dos. You enter dos using the win98 boot disk or any other boot disk you want to use, then put the diagnostic floppy in the floppy drive. The command differs a bit but its usually something like "write zeroes to hard drive". Just click on it and it does the rest.
This is a very useful program as it returns the drive to factory settings. Mainly it gives you a fresh master boot record (mbr). This program is good to use when you have any problems with your hard drive, or when you get an error message something like " disk not found", any time you cant access your hard drive. Its also good to use this program when you are trying to install win xp and it wont install. I'd say 60% of the time it will fix a win xp install and if not then you know its not the hard drive thats bad!.
So its a great program, i use it all the time. In fact, i run the "write zeros to hard drive before all my win xp installs, saves time in the end.
Also, the "write zeros to hard drive" prog eliminates all viruses, malware, trojans, etc, etc, as a lot of them, like trojans, are in the master boot record and cant be deleted any other way. Again, a great little program.
After running this prog then you run scandisk (win98) or chkdsk (win xp).
Scandisk and chkdsk will mark and bad sectors off and they will not be accessed by win98 or win xp or any other os so they will not show up again as bad sectors. If you have done this and get more bad sectors right away that is a hint the drive is failing and shouldnt be used any more! Also, if you have smartdrive enabled in your bios it should tell you the drive is going bad.
Just so you know, when you use "write zeroes to hard drive" you do lose all your data. So if there is data on your drive and you want it and if you can access the drive then take the data off that drive and put it on a cd,dvd, another drive, etc.
Also note that after running this program you still have to format the hard drive, NTFS or FAT32 as you need.

would i need to use 1 of these hd diagnostic tools for my hd wit the current problems i have been having??....... i recently decided to format the drive (samsung hd120ij) due to wantin to clear off everythin!! during the format (quick) it freezes at 20% and when i try a slow format it freezes at 1% then reports back that the drive may be damaged!!! ive only had it for about 4 months so its not like its old and gone senile yet!!

if anyone can help me i would most appreciate it.

also.....
the page explaining about the hutil program says you need to copy it to a floppy diskette i have no floppy drive in my comp, so im thinkin it will work okay burnt to cd-r if anyone thinks it wont be okay could you plz let me know b4 i do something stupid!!!!! thank you

You should certainly try the "zero write" utility. Go to your hard drive mfgrs website and download their diagnostic utility program and run it, inside you will find the "zero write" command.
It only takes a few minutes to run.

i just ran ibm tft version 7.0 and it diagnosed my toshiba laptop hard drive successfully;.

What does TFT stand for?

I could use a little help with a little hard drive. I'm trying to reformat a tiny 30G Toshiba MK3018GAP, which seems to work just fine, but the formatting is soooo sloooow.... We're talking about 1% every two hours (It'll take a week to finish!).

Any suggestions would be appreciated! Thanks.

It Should Have Been Dft Which Stands For Drive Fitness Test. Formatting. If You Have A Windows 98 Startup Disk Insert It And Run Fdisk From A: Prompt. That Should Format More Quickly.

Thanks for that Juicy listing of HDD tools! I will be coming back to use that list, from time to time! Well Done!

Can anyone advise me on how to tranfer software & files onto a new PC which I will be buying?
The new PC willl not be Connected to the internet as it is only used for music writing.
Can I connect the two together with USB or is it more complex than that?

Hope someone can help.

Tanks Paul

You can go and get Aloha Bob's PCRelocator software. it comes with a cable and the software with directions to move all of your stuff and it does it very well. I say it's worth every penny.
That, of course, is only if you need installed programs mo. If you only have saved data files like word, txt., jpg, pdfs and stuff like that, then you could use something like a pocket flash drive, or maybe burn them all to a cd (or DVD if there are more than a cd can hold) and simply drag and drop them into the My Documents folder on the new system. That is where MOST programs save your files.

Drive Utilities

Cute Partition Manager
Freeware partitioning program for use with Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and more...
www.cutepm.com

my harddisk is undetectable please help..
plus i hear a ticking sound, is this hd'slife over or can i still fix it?
please help..
i only bought it 2 years ago.

First, i would check the warranty on the drive because if you are near the end you want to notify the hard disk mfgr right away, then work on diagnosing.
Maxtors have either a 1 or 3 yr warranty.
Most Seagates have a 5 yr warranty but some have 3 yrs.
I forget about western digital, but i think its 1 yr, but check this out at the hard drive mfgrs website where you can find the info as to if your disk is still under warranty.
If you cant find the place to check it out, email the tech support.

Now to see if the disk is bad or not. Ticking noises are not a good sign, though.
If you have access to another pc, then put your disk in another pc, bearing in mind you may have to change the jumper for either master or slave. If this is your main, c:\, hard disk you will have to jumper it to slave to test in another machine.
As for your hard disk, is this your main c: drive?
Also, when you boot up, go to your bios and see if your bios "sees" the hard disk and let us know. To get into bios you usually press the "delete" button when you are booting up.

There are quite a few utilities around to test your disk but give us the answers to these questions first.
Also, you should really start a new thread, only to make sure others see this and come in and help as im certainly not the best around here, thats for sure, lol.
Also, you havent really told us if your pc boots up or not. I am guessing it doesnt but we arent sure as per what you have posted.
Give us info on that and more info on your pc, age, cpu, motherboard if you can, that sort of info. Is there only one hard drive?
Finally, if you do decide to make your own thread, i wont be notified and i may not see your thread, so you can email or pm me if you want. If not, others will help you out anyway.
You arent done yet, we dont know if your hard disk is kaput or not. We will help you figure that out based on you providing the info needed. And dont forget to give us info on the hard disk itself, the size,mfgr, etc.

thanks

I had a "no boot sector found" problem a while back and I came here and somebody had posted a link to a really sweet, lightweight DOS application that you could run directly from windows to test, inspect, repair, recover, and write the MBR to the discs connected to your computer. The utility was awesome. Through some kind of gross lapse of judgement, I deleted the utility, and now I cannot find it anywhere. Does anybody know what I am talking about? Or does anybody know of any similar utility?

I checked out all the items on the list here, but none of them were as simple, elegant and usable as the FREE utility that somebody pointed me to. I was very small, maybe 500Kb, because it had no GUI, just DOS. But the thing that was really great about it, is you could run it straight from Windows, none of these ridiculous "create bootable floppy" programs. Sure you had to be careful about jacking around on your OS drive, but it also gave you access to ANY other hard drives attached to your computer, USB, slaves, etc.

I am after a vaio one, does this thread have it?. My laptop has an error of , 'operating system error''

Hi Rick,
Thanks for the insight,i fixed on of my Fujitsu notebook HDD,i followed your link and downloaded the Hitachi DFT(drive fitness tool) i created the bootable floppy but when i started the notebook i discovered i could use it,please could you tell, me how i can use this tool to fix my 6.10GB DK23AA-60 Hitachi 2.5" HDD?
thanks

Since Seagate has merged with Maxtor, you may want to take down the "PowerMax" link. It no longer exists--only "SeaTools" is still around.

That said, if anyone has any suggestions for diagnosing server SCSI drives in SBS 2003, I could really use one. SeaTools actually says it can work for SCSI drives, but that it can be data destructive. I'd certainly like to avoid that if at all possible! Thanks in advance!

yea, there are multiple levels of tests on SCSI drives; JUST AVOID ALL WRITE TESTS

you want to test SCSI technology, not the media. To check the media, revert to CHKDSK