Hard Drive issue - cannot boot WinXP

[edeangel]

I had PC-Dr run the normal diagnostic routing on my ThinkCenter PC, and it returned an error with the hard drive.  Specifically, the linear verify failed on one sector, and the SMART test also failed.  However, I then ran the full linear surface scan, and there was no error.

Can you explain a little about what these different tests are checking, and also whether there is any way to avoid replacing my hard drive (e.g., mark the offending sector as bad?)

I had experienced a longer than normal boot-up a few months ago, but then everything was fine until yesterday when my power cut out.  When the power came back on, windows launched chkdsk and everything passed and XP started normally, but as soon as I started to close some TSRs, the whole thing powered down and did a cold reboot, whereupon chkdsk ran again with windows and hung.  I had to manually cold boot it, and now I only get to the windows splash screen and it keeps on manually cold booting itself.  I was able to run PC-Dr. through the Access IBM menus on the diagnostic partition.

Any help / information is appreciated.  Thanks!

[fwilson]

edeangel,

As soon as drives start throwing SMART errors it's time to replace them. The SMART tests reference internal counters in the drive that keep track of many variables that may indicate impending failure.  Drives are capable of remapping bad sectors, this is why the test failed then passed.

I would remove this drive from the laptop, mount it in another system and back up your data.

You may be able to get the system back up and going by starting in safe mode (F8 at startup) however I wouldn't do this until you have a backup.

In either case it is time to replace the drive.

-Fred