Re: Is my harddrive dead, what should I do?

"need4greed" <Raymond13@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1128048197.166814.137580@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> I have a WD1600JB. Yesterday my computer crashed and when I rebooted,
> everything became really slow. So I powered off (shut down don't work).
> And now when I turn on the computer, it stays at the "detecting IDE"
> for almost 30 secs. Then finally it would recognize the HD and proceed
> to boot up XP. However, normally it takes me 30 secs to boot, now it
> takes several mins. Even after window is booted, everything is slow.
> The mouse would work fine, but when I press the 'Start' button, it
> takes minutes for anything to happen, essentially the system is
> useless. Any suggestion?

Sounds VERY similar to what happened to me last week.

When I disconnected the problem disk, the system would boot up fine, with no
unusual delays. Plug the faulty disk back in and it went REALLY slowly,
just as you describe.

I booted from a floppy and attempted to do a chkdsk / scandisk, which showed
that one partition (of 4 on the disk) had problems on it.

Using DiskPart, I eventually managed to clone the disk to a spare (which
took around 24 hours on an 80Gb disk, doing a sector by sector copy). The
cloned disk then worked absolutely fine. The original disk gave errors in
the (Maxtor) manufacturer test software, but after doing a low-level format,
no errors were found on subsequent checks.

Not sure whether I could have recovered the partition easier (I did try on
the original after I was happy I had a working clone, but had no success in
recovering the original partition) but making a clone may be an option for
you. I had actually made the clone expecting to then have to rebuild the
partition info or FAT, but when the clone was finished, it worked fine with
no tweaking needed. :oD

HTH.

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