Hard disk detection fail

[mrsoft]

Hi
I had defragment running on my laptop then while it was running i uninstalled malware anubyte from my laptop and it asked me to restart the laptop so i cancelled the defragment and restarted my laptop.Then after restarting it said computer had some peoblems so run the repair or start normally but start normally when was clicked it just kept on showing starting windows logo but the laptop didnt start so restarted it again and tried again but still didnt start (even with repair) and i repeated the process.Then at one point it stopped detecting my hard disk and then i ran via bootdisk i kept it the whole day it reached the postion where it showed me my folders but i couldnt copy or do anything with it then i restarted again.AFter certain point without bootdisk it didnt detect hard disk and asked for boot disk and the bios also didnt detect i even tried placing my hard disk in another lapto p and it too didnt detect .

So could the problem be with software or hardware?
Help qould be really appreciated
Thanks

 

[lopdog]

This sounds like a dead or dying hard disk. What brand is your disk? Most hard disk manufacturers have diagnostic software that can be downloaded and burned on a CD to be booted from. They can run all kind of tests to see if you hard disk is in good shape.

But if two different computers are unable to even detect the hard disk, I'm quite sure it's faulty.

 

[captaincranky]

Defragmentation moves files. You can cancel it all you want, but the "move from to data" remains in RAM until that move is completed. So, you can't shut off the computer, even during a canceled defrag, because the info in RAM is purged.

It is I suppose arguable, the defragger completes a given move during the shut down sequence, but of this I am not sure, and on it I would not depend.

 

[mrsoft]

Ya i guess so btw my hard disk is of toshiba same as my laptop i just tried booting frm win 98 and it showed me that the hard disk has suffered physical damage or sumthin so i need it to get it to a technican . After finding my comp not getting strtd i had turned it on and off a huge number of times even during the disk repair window which comes up when booting with win 7 Could that be the cause because i had reached one stage where i could see my hardrive nd things in it but could not do nythin wid them like i tried plugging usb nd copying sum data but it didnt

 

[captaincranky]

As I said, I'm not sure what happened, but it does seem rather odd the HDD would physically fail exactly when you were defragging and removing programs simultaneously. I thought that Windows 7 ran defrag as a background process, and you really didn't need to do it, or at least not as often as you might in an XP box.

That's too much coincidence for me to accept. It could be true, and if it were indeed strange.

Other strategies to test the disk completely involve writing all zeros to the drive with a program designed to do that, then a complete reformat. I don't really know if the 5400RPM drives normally used in laptops are more or less dependable than HDDs for the desktop. I do have a personal bias against drives from TSST corp. Whether or not that is justified, again, I do not know. I've had no luck with them, that's for sure.