Hard drive trouble

[Skaramush]

now ive been having a lot of trouble with my seagate bar sata 200gig harddrive a while ago ive started having it beep and make my mouse freeze for a bit when i was browsing stuff after testing with seatools diagnostics ive figured out that it had bad sectors which ive replaced with diagnostic program ive been running it fine for a while afterward till i started having problems with it again , so i decided to zero fill drive so i had it low formatted and reinstalled windows on it , it crashed for me after reinstalled and now that ive tried reload it with windows or erasing it and trying to load it as extra storage i get this sort of error when trying to load:

ntldr is missing
press ctrl alt delete to restart

p.S: previous diagnostics seemed to show defective sectors but now drives seems fine on diagnostic but still fails to work .

any ideas?

[Steve B]

if its missing ntldr, then the installation is corrupted.

1) Make sure the sata cable is properly connected
2) Make a DOS Boot Disk on another machine and boot into DOS. Type "fdisk /mbr" and push enter, which should re-write the master boot record.
3) Put your XP installation CD into the drive, and when it prompts you to install it, push "R" instead, to repair the installation already there.
4) Make sure the drive is formatted usint NTFS, rather than FAT32.
5) If none of the above work, reinstall windows, using a full-format, rather than a quick format.

Good Luck,
Steve B

[Skaramush]

yeah thx well i just zero filled the drive and installed the raid drivers that seemed to have solved it , ill just stick to my old maxtor as main windows drive and keep the big one as extra storage, time will tell if its good or not.

[blueball]

If you are seeing bad sectors on a modern drive then its time to lose the drive.