Possibly dead hard drive?

[kasavien]

Hi All

If Windows Event Viewer is reporting disk errors about a bad sector on a hard drive, does this mean that the drive is on its way out or can it still be used? The reason I ask is that the hard drive in my girlfriends laptop is reporting these errors and the windows installation has become corrupted and most but not all applications will not load because windows tries to install them again. Also it's not possible to get on the internet on it. I'd like to know if I try to format and reinstall windows on the existing hard drive would I be wasting my time or would it be ok. Or should I just put a new hard drive in and start from there?

Many Thanks

Andy

[Agent]

Right click the drive -> Properties -> Run the disk checker with "check for bad sectors" or whatever its named these days.

That'll scan the drive for surface errors, but I doubt event viewer is wrong.

Some drives can have bad sectors, never have another one pop up and work for years. Others can die soon after they start appearing. In my experience, the latter is more likely.

Given the cost of drives these days, I wouldn't risk the data

[5cupa]

could be that windows is the more corrupt part rather than the drive. reinstall windows from a complete fresh/full partition remove and see how you go from there

[smargh]

Download Speedfan. Click the button to do the online interpretation of the SMART data. Reallocated blocks are bad, mmkay.
http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

You could also try the HDD manufacturer's drive diagnostics software which can do a full surface scan and mark sectors as bad or reallocate them to the spare sectors.

However, if you do have visible reallocated sectors (i.e. the HDD has failed enough such that it cannot hide the failures from Windows), then you need to replace it. Statistically speaking, a drive that has any OS-visible faults or reallocated sectors is *much* more likely to fail earlier than another "healthy" drive.