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Do I have a bad hard drive

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by catherine

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End user's computer shut down for no reason. Now when I try to start it, it keeps restarting. It will not stay on long enough to show Windows splash. It will not stay on long enough to open in Safe Mode. I took the hard drive out and installed it as a slave in my computer. I see the drive, but when I try to open it, I get the following error: Not accessible- File or Deirectory is corrupted and unreadable. Does this mean I need a new hard drive?

8 replies

by antuck

You maybe dealing with a bad drive. I would go to the manufactures web site and run there diagnostic utility on the drive.

by catherine

Thanks! The drive passed the Quick and Extended scans with no errors. Any other suggestions? When I try to complete a virus scan, it reports no problems, but the scan only lasts a second. Not long enough to actually scan.

by antuck

IS the second computer your using also running XP?

If it is, when the drive is attached and you boot up, does Windows state it needs to check the drive for errors?

Although the diagnostic software said there were no errors it maybe possible the drive is intermintanly failing. I have seen this where running the disganostic test will pass but I couldn't do anything with the drive.

You may want to try two things.

One boot to the XP disk and try and do a repair on Windows. This shouldn't delete any data on the system, but just reload windows back on the drive. You may have to reinstall software and you would need to reinstall the updates from Microsoft. See if the drive will let windows reload.

The second thing would be a format and reinstall. This does wipe everything from the drive including data. But this will be another test for the hard drive. If it fails during the format then I would say the drive was bad.

by catherine

Thanks for all the help. I installed the hard drive in the original box and formatted it. I reinstalled all software and it seemed to be working fine on Monday afternoon. However, several times yesterday the screen locked up and had flashing lines running through it. The only way to recover is to restart the machine. The same thing has happened at least once this morning. Should I give up on this hard drive and get another?

by maxwell edison

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And the other computer can't read the drive because it's a different file system, incompatible size with the BIOS, etc.

My guess is a bad Motherboard

by antuck

I think I would go with another hard drive. It is really interesting that when running the diagnostic test and formating the drive some thing didn't give an error message.

At this point since you mentioned that you got an access denied error message when the drive was connected to a different system, I would try a different drive. If it is possible, before buying new, maybe try another hard drive in this computer. There maybe something else going wrong, but at this point I do think it is the drive. This way if another drive is in the computer and you still get lock up issues, you'll know there is something else going wrong.

What model hard drive is this? I've had some Western Digitals get really hot and start acting up. So many that I stopped using them all together.

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