toshiba hdd unreadable sectors

[AdamBCohen]

I have a toshiba satilite 1905-s301 running xp home. When I boot up each time it goes through a scan disk and tells me 10-15 sectors are unreadable. Then I can get into windows, but scan disk will not run in the normal os mode. Also, I can not get into any of the safe modes, because the os crashes on me. Before I go out to buy a new hdd I was wondering if there is anything that I have missed.

 

[micker377]

Can you go in through safe mode, and back up to a USB hard drive? Then you could re-format the hard drive to try to repair it. You'll probably need the back-up to put on a new drive anyway. Do you have a floppy on the system? You could use Fdisk (from a Win 98 boot disk), to start up and re-partition and reformat. This would tell you if the drive is "salvageable".

 

[garebo]

My advice is pretty much the same as micker. The drive is likely too far gone to be reliable.
Best to get your data off it then try and repair using a win98 boot disk and perhaps the h drive mfgr diagnostic floppy or fdisk. I would use the h drive mfgr diagnostic and write zeros to the drive. If it works the drive might be ok for non-critical stuff, if not, its toast.
Just my opinion, but been there and done that.


Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[JimInKS]

I have had good luck with spinrite 6.0 recovering non-bootable XP systems. It does cost $89, but I think they have a money back guarantee.

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

 

[AdamBCohen]

Thanks for the advice. But how come I can get into normal mode of Xp, but none of the safe modes. That is the part that I do not understand.

 

[micker377]

There have been "threads" on this subject (safemode, but no real mode). The usual cure was to re-install the OS.

 

[JimInKS]

I would guess that the unreadable portion of the disk contains files needed for safe mode. Windows seems to have no tolerance for disk errors.

I have never understood why in 2005 windows can't recover from, or at least accurately report, it is having disk errors. I have had systems thrash around for hours without reporting any errors.

I would bet that Spinrite can fix this if you are willing to invest $89.

An OS reinstall will probably also fix this as mentioned above.

 

[AdamBCohen]

Thank you so much for the advice. I will look for spinrite, and let you know what is happening. Or I will reformat. Thanks