A broken HD

Yuchao719

Yuchao719

Geek
My neighbour has a 30Gb Samsung HD which stopped functioning a few days ago. She brought the computer to future shop and they added a 40Gb HD.

Problem: When computer(WinME) started up a few days ago, DOS prompted to scandisk because I think it said the FAT had problems. Just when the computer loaded the blue screen of scandisk, it froze. However, when the guys @ future shop tested the HD, they said it had no problems! My neighbour gave me the bad 30gig cos she didn't like it and I tried it on my computer as Pr.Slave. I booted with the Win98 bootfloppy(because Scandisk always froze) and tried to format the HD, and it gave the message:
"Bad media or damaged Track 0. Storage device unformattable" or something like that. :(

1st question - why did FShop say that the HD was working? I'm sure they
tested it properly because the jumper was already set on Slave when the HD came back from FShop.

2nd question - why did the HD just randomly quit.

3rd question - Is there any way I can fix the HD? I can still copy small files under dos from the 30gig without having it freeze. All files and directories are still there when I do a dir, but fails to tell me how big the files in the directories are.

Thanks.
 
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My first guess would be to check if it's overheating (usually a good bet if your getting random, inexplicable crashes with any hardware). Test it while keeping it outside the case with a fan on it if possible and see if that makes a difference. If it's not that then I don't know. If possible, you could try getting hold a Linux installation CD and try putting that one. I've experienced at least three hard-drives in my time that Windows did not like at all but when I tried to install Linux there was no problem at all. In one case WIN98 refused to recognise that an 8GB hard-drive had any more than 500MB so I gave it that 500MB while Linux quite happily sat in the rest!

Give those a try and tell me how it goes.
 
I'd use whatever diagnostic software Samsung has available for you. If you don't have it, you should be able to download it from Samsung's website. There's a possibility that it's on it's way out.
 
I tried knoppix. Comp booted and able to access data on the broken HD. I can open up files and folders. However, I can't access big folders like the "Program Files" folder and the Windows folder. When I try to, Konqueror freezes and I can hear loud clanking from the HD.

Seems like disk has bad sectors.
 
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