i suspect a possible bad drive how to check?

[sookey]

hello, i run win 98se. have a 20 gig seagate hard drive. my pcs performance has been off for a few weeks; and absolutely awful for a week now. have run all updated av programs and adaware and spybot and tds-s and hijack this. everything shows good. the drive has not been willing to snandisk or defrag for a few weeks as it kept telling me there were errors on the drive; however i finally got both to complete while in safemode yesterday. after turning off some things in start up and getting the scan and defrag to complete my pc is better; however not great. how do i check this drive. if it is bad i have nortons ghost to ghost my image to a new drive; however have never personally done this myself. anyone else w/ experience w/ this and could you help?
rachel

 

[wolluf]

http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/

 

[satrow]

Your hard disk has plenty of free space, 25%+, does it?
Norton Ghost (disk to disk) from a floppy is quite straightforward but a clean install to a new disk will be better; install your A/V first, install your progs; then attach the old drive and copy over or import your data.

Andy.

 

[sookey]

the problem w/ reloading all of the software manually is that 2 of my programs are purchased licensed versions that their licensing files will not load;therefore I have to contact the vender for licensing; and I have not renewed my support subscription and really can not afford to.

i was gonna try to set one drive up as a slave to ghost the image. is that right?
thanks alot
rach

 

[satrow]

If you have Ghost on a bootable floppy, set your original disk as master on the primary cable and your new disk as master on the secondary. Check on startup that they are both being seen by the BIOS, and that the machine is set to boot from floppy.
The program is quite straightforward if used this way. I usually just unplug the cables from the CD and use them to attach the new drive.
Once you are happy with your connections and choices and have let Ghost do its' thing, it will ask to reboot. It will still boot to your original drive until you shut off and swap drives.

Andy.

 

[sookey]

thanks i will try that if needed.
just downloaded the seagate utility. selected the floppy disk version. when i try to boot my machine w/ the floppy in a it just tells me cant load dos.
azny thoughts?

 

[satrow]

Strange message, Rach. What was the exact wording it used? Was there an installer for making the disk, or did you simply copy the download over (I've not used Seatools for quite some time)?

Andy.

 

[sookey]

IT just came across the to of the screen:
unable to load dos! hit any key to try again.
the website downloads the file to your hard drive. when you execute it- it gives you instructs to insert floppy disks to your drive it them copies the utility to the floppies. you are supposed to shut down put the first one in a: and then reboot w/ it in the machine.
i made a second set and they so far are working the quick test was good. it is going the thorough one now.
we will se
rach