Problems with my Western Digital Hard Drive

[ViagraPolice]

I have a 300gb Western Digital Sata 3.0 Hard Drive. Recently there was a power outage in my area that caused my computer to shut down. A few hours after I turned it back on everything was running fine until I recieved a numerous amount of errors in windows XP, forcing me to shut down the computer and run the check disk utility. While running the check disk utility, around 10 or so files were deleted because of being corrupted. Then when I booted back into windows xp it stopped at a black screen and never went to the desktop. So I decided to try and repair windows by booting directly from my windows cd which is slipstreamed with sp2. everything was fine until the cd began copying setup files on to my hard drive. At about 50 percent I got an error with one of the files saying it wasn't able to be copied correctly and said that my cd may be damaged. I decided to ignore the file and continue installing, but the next 20 files or so had the same error. So after reading this I decided to use another windows xp install disc (I have about 4). That and the other 3 I used all got the same error when repairing windows on various setup files on the disc. So i just decided to format my hard drive and install a fresh copy of windows. After I partioned and formatted my hard drive using windows xp, it began copying the setup files and at about 50 percent, I got the same errors as before. I then tried all my install discs again and I was still getting the same problems. A friend suggested that I low level format my hard drive, but is the hard drive the problem? Do I need a new one?

 

[MrCoffee]

go to western digitals web site and aquire some diagnotic software appropriate for your HDD. (you will probably need an error code from this software before you can RMA the drive)

A low level format is not an option, this needs to be done by the manufacturer to preserve the file structure on the disk.
If you low level format with anything other than approved soft from the manufacturer you seriously risk permanently destroying the drive.

Have you tried running a full chkdsk from the recovery console? some thing like chkdsk c: /r

Edit: additionally, thinking about it you should test your RAM, it may be your RAM than is faulty an causing these problems so get memtest86 and run that for a few hours.

 

[Point Break]

Sadly yes it seems your harddrive is the problem, its not uncommon for power outages to break a hard drive, and if you cannot fix it with a check disk you only other options are to buy a hard drive repair program and hope it is able to repair the damage, or simple buy another hard drive.

 

[turtile]

Try using knoppix Linux (Live CD - knopper.net) It will run from the cd drive, if it works, the cd drive is ok and you will be able to run your computer and access the hard drive even if it is broken.

Its most likely the hard drive but you can still use the comptuer this way.

 

[OatesyX]

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ if you get that and use the hd tools to reset the 0s on your hard drive that may work,, its like an intensive format,

 

[jonny_uk]

Bummer, was a nice hard drive too, id be gutted if my 300 gig seagate barracuder got damaged by a powercut!