Is this hard drive useless? 1

[packdragon]

I'm pretty sure something is wrong with this hard drive, here's the scenario...

A Dell Dimension 8100 was sitting in storage for about a month. I brought it out, turned it on, and it wouldn't boot. So I booted with a Windows 2000 CD and attempted to reinstall the OS. It went through the initial setup (including hard drive partitioning and formatting) just fine, up until the point where it has to reboot.

Normally after reboot you would finish up the setup process by selecting what components you want to install, but it never gets there. I just get the same message as before, "". As if the initial setup never happened.

Putting in a new hard drive solved the problem. My question is, is this hard drive a piece of garbage now? Why was Windows 2000 setup able to detect, partition, format, and write setup files to it?

This is a Western Digital 20GB IDE hard drive that came with the Dell. The machine is out of warranty (of course), and so is the hard drive itself (I checked the serial nubmer on the Western Digital site). Should I just toss it or is there some way to save it?

- Zoe, that's ZOH-EEE, get it right please
- Just a little ol' MCP at Solien Technology
-

http://www.solien.com

 

[wolluf]

Why would you want to keep it - its obviously defective - so if you did manage to load anything on it, chances are you'd lose it. If you bin it - that can't happen.

I suppose, if you just wanted it for use in a test machine where data never mattered, you could try zero filling it (can't remember if WD have uility to do this now - but killdisk - Google for it - would do this). You could also try running WD's diagnostic (should be on WD website) to see what it says about the drive.

 

[packdragon]

Thanks for the tips! Didn't know about those utils. But you're probably right, I should just toss 'em and be done with it.

- Zoe, that's ZOH-EEE, get it right please
- Just a little ol' MCP at Solien Technology
-

http://www.solien.com