Major Hard Drive Problem!

[Nocturial]

Something very funny has happened to my hard drive of late - a part of the hard drive seems to have been damaged and I'm not sure how it happened or how to fix it. There are bad clusters everywhere, most of which Scandisk has claimed to have fixed yet I can't install Windows or ANYTHING on the HD. I've done a hard format and a full 7-pass wipe TWICE and still the problem continues. After a fresh wipe I've made partitions and most of them sit there for an hour with the message 'finding allocation cluster' or something along that line. In a surface scan I spot a bunch of bad cluster markings but full formats just won't cure the problem.

Can anyone here help out with this problem? I'm completely stuck with it and don't know the way out of this one.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Lonman]

depending on the drive, you might be able to get the manufacturers setup disk and run their diagnostics on it and allow it to do a low level format (wiping the drive clean). May also have an option to re-certify the drive to factory specs or something. That 'could' fix it, but i'm more inclined to believe it's wearing out in a hurry.

 

[PC-Dude]

I had a WD hard drive do the same thing and eventually it crapped out completely and I had to replace it. Started with some lockups in windows then went on to not even being able to run fdisk. Hope yours isn't the same but it's not looking good.

 

[Friend of Bill]

Pc Dude: I know I'm off topic, but why don't you use Double-ClickER as handle?

 

[Trev]

I had the exact same problem, it was on my brand new harddrive. I wans't sure the probem, clusters were going bad every reboot, ect.. ect.. I ended up doing a memtester program, and i had a bad strip of ram. I bought a new strip, and that solved my problem. I guess the moral of my worthless blabber is u might wanna test ur ram.

 

[[spoon]]

my friend fried 4 WD harddrives in under 6 weeks!
some just aint as good as others

 

[Trev]

4 WD's? wow im suprised. I got the WD special edition, 120gig, 8mb cache. I only had the one problem with it, but that was due to bad ram. other than that, it just kicks ass!