Hard drive is corrupted

cptkid570

New Member
Hi all...
I use windows 2000 on my computer and it recently crashed.. I got it to work for a little bit but was still having problems. I was able to burn a copy of all of my valuable files...then I figured that I'd reformat the hard drive and just reinstall everything. Tried doing this using the windows 2000 disk. It seems like everything is working ok and it seems to format the hard drive and then I get an error that says that it can't format the hard disk because it's corrupt. I think that portions of it may be bad, but for the most part, I think it's ok.

Is there any way to format this hard drive eventhough windows says it's corrupted?
 

Lorand

<b>VIP Member</b>
I had a similar problem with XP. After a total crash the XP setup said the harddisk was corrupted and was not willing to install XP nor format the hard drive, so I was forced to format it low-level. See this page for details: http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/low-level-format.html
It turned out that the crash was caused by a faulty memory module. I replaced the faulty RAM and ever since the harddisk is working fine and has no bad sectors.
So check your RAM first.
 

Lorand

<b>VIP Member</b>
There is a simple way to test your RAM -- download the memtest from here: http://www.memtest86.com/
I noticed that bad memory modules alone can rarely cause a corruption in HDD. But if you have XP or 2000, after a crash caused by bad RAM the chkdsk can mess up badly the file system (regardless that it's FAT32 or NFTS) and you may end up having all windows system files as chunks in lost clusters... The good old scandisk of win95 and win98 didn't have this strange behaviour.
So if your computer has XP or 2000 installed then it's a good idea to check your RAM at least once per month.
 
Top