Bad Sectors

[WhiteFlare]

I recently booted my laptop into Fedora and right when I get to the desktop I get a message saying that my HDD has many bad sectors and that its failing. However, I have not had any problems with the HDD in the past while running windows.

At first I thought it was just a problem with a program in Fedora, so I booted the same Fedora on my other laptop and I did not get the message.

Any ideas? Could my HDD actually be failing?

 

[S0ULphIRE]

In the command prompt type in the below:

chkdsk /r

It will ask you whether you want to schedule the check for the next time your computer restarts, press Y (for yes) then restart your computer.

 

[WhiteFlare]

 

[S0ULphIRE]

chkdsk /r already implies /f, did you run that first?

 

[WhiteFlare]

Do I need to add a volume like "chkdsk C: /r" ? Because nothing happens when I restart.

 

[S0ULphIRE]

You can specify a drive letter to check, yes. Default is the C: drive though, and if that's the suspect drive then you don't need to include the C: in the chkdsk command.
After you type in chkdsk /r into the command prompt in windows, what happens? Do you get any messages?

 

[WhiteFlare]

It says that chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. And if I would like to run chkdsk next time the system restarts. I type "Y" and then restart my computer. It boots to the desktop and nothing happens.

 

[WhiteFlare]

Hey, guess what else I found? The computer that is suspected to have bad sectors is the one I got from school (which is band new when we get them). A friend from school who also has the same laptop bought a SSD to replace his old Hard drive and found that the screw with the spring on it was not even screwed in. So I opened mine up and sure enough....the screw wasnt even screwed it keeping the HDD from bouncing around.

 

[S0ULphIRE]

Ouch, yeah that's definitely not good

What you can try is boot off the XP disc, press 'R' to go into the repair console, then run the chkdsk command from there.
OR, if you don't have the disk, try booting into Safe Mode (by pressing F8 during startup) and running chkdsk from there.