Is this hard drive bad?

[bevills1]

Recently I was given an old Compaq Armada 7400 notebook computer with 10 GB hard drive, no recovery disk and Windows 2000 OS. It would boot to point of freezing when progress bar gets half way where it says Windows is starting. Same results for last known good configuration, safe mode, safe mode with command prompt, etc. After several minutes a message states drive may be damaged or virus may be present. Attempt to reformat and do fresh install results in hang for several minutes at 9% format progress after which message stating "Windows is unable to format this drive. Drive may be damaged, may need drivers from recovery disk or drive not properly terminated." This result was same for both Windows 2000 and Windows XP attempts to format. Windows 98SE format was also tried resulting in freeze at 9% format progress, and just hangs there without giving any message. Is this a bad drive, or is there another possible problem that might be fixed?

[MOVIEGEEK]

Yes I think it's the hard drive.
The good news is hard drives are cheap these days and higher capacity,make sure to get a 7200RPM:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_slc.asp?CatId=1277

[redwudz]

It does sound like the hard drive is the problem. One handy tool I have found is the Bart PE disc. You can find it on the net with a Google search for 'bartpe disc'. If you have a CD drive on the computer, you can boot from this disc into a version of Windows and run diagnostics and even programs without a hard drive.

It may let you repair the hard drive, though that's unlikely from what you describe. But it will let you run the computer long enough to see if the hard drive is the only problem. It's also nice for salvaging data from a problematic hard drive if Windows won't boot.

The disc can be a very handy diagnostic tool and well worth having for future problems also.

[jagabo]

What I've done in a case like this is create two partitions. Since your bad spot is around 9% in, make the first partition 12 or 15 percent of the disk. Don't bother formatting it. Then use the rest of the disk as your boot partition.

On the other hand you can get a new 20GB drive for $30:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822152047

Actually those are out of stock right now but you can easily find a drive for ~$50.

[bevills1]

The 2 partition idea suggested by jagabo was also tried which resulted in same errors at different points for both partitions. This seems to indicate 2 or more bad spots on the drive I believe, and best bet may be to replace the drive.