HDD gone ??

[atifds9]

Hi all seem to have developed a problem with my lovely new samsung spinpoint 160gb 7200rpm hardrive. All was well was using the computer in normal fashion when al of a sudden everything seemd to slow down and halt like xp crashing machine had been on for two days and thought ohh it just needs a reboot so selected start>restart.

Fisrt problem was the machine wouldn't boot in to xp after 5 mins of no activity i got nowhere and so pressed reset the second time it tried to boot it came up with hal.dll is corrupt or missing, fair enough i thought i'd been meaning to reinstall anyway and i had my hardisk in two prtions c my boot and d my data so i thought i'll just re-install xp all data is safe on d partition no joy when i boot from xp cd and i select install winxp when i get to the screen that says select partition you want to install on there are no partions there and xp says the disk is not recognized i press enter and setup crashes(blue screen of death with some error message) so i tried booting from win 98 cd and it boots fine and i run fdsik and select enable large disk report at this point the fdisk program crashes out saying fixed disk read error.

I'm stumped anyone have any ideas is there anyway i can format the hdd and restart or is it the hdd thats faulty, running on my old maxtor 13gb at the minute.

Thanks for any help

Atif

[Lexeus]

When my 40 gig IBM drive failed on me the same thing as you said happened, xp slowed down, then just seemed to crash. But then it started making a noise and my pc didnt want to boot with it in, and it wouldn't working in my test pc either.
I used the IBM/Hitachi drive test program to make sure it was borked.
I recommend going to the Samsung site and getting their drive test tool. They must have one ? I assume so anyway ...

[atifds9]

Hi all sorry about the delay n responding but the day my hdd went down my new case mobo and cpu arrived so spent the last day builing that and tried my drive in it no joy went to the samsung site and downloaded there diagnostic tool it passes most tests then comes to the surface test where it fails on every sector saying data uncorrectobale, so i thought i'd try a low level format but when it runs it does a test scan of the drive and it says there are no errors on your drive low level format is not neccesary??

i'm stumped but i think i'll rma it seen as it fails the self diagnostic test ?

thanks

Atif