dead hard drive?

[lumis]

a friend of mine brought me his laptop, telling me there were problems.. when i first booted it up, it said no o/s.. so i popped in an xp cd and installed xp pro w/ sp2 (quick format, ntfs), installed no problem.. until i installed touchpad drivers and restarted.. then i got some message about corrupt files in the \windows\system32\config folder.. i ran the recovery console, restored good files, everything was okay.. went along installing windows updates, restarted.. same error, corrupt files.. i knew something fishy was going on on, so i booted up off the xp cd again to do another install, did a ntfs full format.. it dies @ 3%, tried it 2 more times, dies at the same 3%.. so then i booted up my spinrite 6 cd and had it run a check on the drive.. its been running for almost 13 hours now, it's only 5% through with the drive, with an estimated 219 hours & 17 minutes to go.. it's found 10 bad sectors so far..

am i better off just scrapping this drive, or is there something else that i could do to make this drive function again?

[smearbrick1]

With 219 hours to go? Scrap it...

[waheed]

With drives being mechanical, it sounds like a physical problem.

However, you could try deleting the partition, creating a new partition, full format again and install Win XP. If all else fails, you're looking at a new HDD.

[Jayhawk]

If it's a name brand hard drive like a Seagate or Maxtor (or WD) you can find tools on their sites to do a low-level format and/or complete diagnostic test. I had a Seagate that appeared totally lost but the SeaTools stuff on their website repaired the damage. (probably just marked sectors as bad/hidden). I'd try that before I'd scrap it.

[pbhalerao]

Even at the measly $5 per hour rate, if you spend that much time, you will have spent nearly $1100.

That is enough money to buy a brand new (very good spec) computer - laptop or otherwise.

Maybe you will fix the disk; maybe you can't. Question is, if everything is OK in the end, will you be able to trust this disk?