Strange Hard Disk problem

[CJ1]

I have 3 hard drives. My windows hard drive is on a SATA Seagate Barracuda 180GB (The C: drive). I have 2 western digital 120GB spare. One is running as a SATA (The F: drive) due to the IDE to SATA converter with the ABIT NF7-S (ver 2.0) MB and the other is IDE. The problem I began experiencing was with the IDE drive which is set as master (The D: drive). I formatted and partitioned all my drives with Partition Magic 7.0. I am running Windows XP Home edition.



Yesterday the drive had renamed itself to Local Disk (D instead of what I had called it. I could not acces any files on it and properties recognised it as RAW instead of NTFS. Windows told me that the drive had not been formatted however it was recognised in the BIOS.



Looking at event viewer, I noticed that lots of error messages were saying that Device Hard Disk 2 (D has a bad block.



I have checked all cables and moved the drive so that it will receive cool air. I reset the CMOS jumper. The first time I booted the PC Windows still said local disk(D and RAW but I could see and move my files. I moved them to another drive. The second time I rebooted, the drive was seen as I had created it and NTFS was in the properties.



What should I do about this drive? Reformat and repartition? Low level format?



Thanks for any help.

 

[connchri]

If it's bad blocks, get the tools from the Western Digital website and do a low level format. That is if there is no way to get information of the disc. A good way of trying is using a Knoppix or other linux CD-Bootable distribution and see if it can read the "Dodgy" hard drive.

Doing a low level format on this level will insure that if you got any damaged blocks due to a writing fault or the hard disc head acidently hitting the disc surface, they could well be cured. Do a low level disc check/scan before re-using the disc though, to be sure to be sure.

 

[CJ1]

The new toolset won't LLF and it's recommended for drives larger than 80GB.

 

[zero4zero]

If you run scandisk and let it check for bad clusters and there are some, well forget about that disk.
It is like a paved road with a bump in it. You hit the bump, the vehicule bounces and make more bumps. Scandisk will knock out the bad clusters, but it won't stop others from being created, and that is why Windows is doing its' thing!