hard disk bad sector

[real_in]

hey guyss i m here again when i m in problem.. sorry for being selfish.. but i m lil busy these days..

anyways .. since last month my laptop is givin me troubles.. like when i switch it own, after the tab screen it gives be black blank screen instead of giving windows logo..

and the screen remains black until i take its battery off, or press the power button for more than 5 secs..

i i have to do it thrice or four times, after i restart or turn it off and then on.. also i have showed it to some repair center, they say motherboard is pretty ok..

now i doubt if my HDD has got some bad sectors,,,

can u guyss recommend me any tool to check that out.. cause it is from hitachi and that too is of 20Gb and i know it is time to upgrade, but jus wanted to make sure, if it is the HDD which is faulty for that black screen..

on hitachi's website i found some useless tools which never worked... can u guyss recommend any diagnostic tool, which can detect and can fix bad sectors..

thanks in advance

realin!

 

[Mr Wizard]

C:\chkdsk /r

checks bad sectors

 

[LA1]

if you run check disk do not use thr "r" switch, that is repair. if you have bad sectors, you need to back up your data. More then likely you will corrupt your OS if you have bad sectors and you run chkdsk.

 

[real_in]

mann i chkdsk has schedule itself at the startup and everytime it runs, it stucks at 0% and hangs my pc also..

how can i get rid off it .. im sure my disk is faulty and its time to chnage it,, but until then i wanna remove it from startup..

 

[LA1]

sounds like you have win 98 ? do you ?

long time since i used win 98,,, ummmm click start , run
type in msconfig. i think there is an advanced tab or look around, there is something that goes to another gui, that has a check box.

will it start in safe mode ?

also ehen chkdsk starts just hit the " X " key to "eXit"

 

[EricB]

use powermax in my signature to do a full format. wiping with 0's has the same effect

 

[poorman]

if you run check disk do not use thr "r" switch, that is repair. if you have bad sectors, you need to back up your data. More then likely you will corrupt your OS if you have bad sectors and you run chkdsk.

I have had first hand experience with that. Had a faulty Maxtor drive, left it doing a chkdsk on boot. Came home to the logon screen with a small error box saying somthing like "Can't find winlogon.exe...." hit ok. My computer was very very slow to login and bring up my desktop. I hit the power off and turned it back on to a blank screen. It was real bad, tried to slave it to another machine bought and ran almost every data recovery app made. Ran this one check that lasted 3 days straight. Was able to see all my files but couldn't recover them everytime it would do it it would be 32kb in size. And now I backup many times a month on 2 different hard drives. Backup now then run chkdsk.