Hard Drive Death

[SpikedCola]

Ive got a friends laptop, and the hard drive wiped itself one day (or so I was told). I put XP on it, and after restarting due to a DRIVER_IRQL bluescreen, XP whined that it couldnt find the HKLM hive in the registry. Reinstalled, same thing.

Did a chkdsk /r and the computer would freeze up at 59%. Pulled the hard drive, put it in my computer, and after a day of scanning, it found a bunch of errors, and was at 97%. Chkdsk froze up and wouldnt budge. Did it again when I rescanned, except without the errors.

Found a program called HDD Regenerator, and its been running for two days. 1287 bad sectors found & fixed, and 17000MB into the drive (its an 80GB drive). Should I let it keep going? Is there something I can do to fix it sooner? ~21% through in a couple days seems like its going to take forever.

 

[brinks]

You should test out your friends ram for problems too, it could have been that that gave the errors to the hard drive.

 

[SpikedCola]

Guess I should have mentioned, first thing I did was ran Memtest86+ overnight. 30 something passes later with no errors.

 

[brinks]

Maybe you should tell your friend to get a new hard drive, personally I wouldn't want to use a drive with bad sectors on it.

 

[SpikedCola]

Im likely going to go that route, and keep the drive for myself and hopefully fix it (since Im sure this whole waiting days and days isnt making him too happy).

This HDD Regenerator program apparently fixes the bad sectors, so best case scenario, he gets a new hard drive and I end up with a working drive.