Is My HDD Corrupt?

[YSM]

A day ago I was playing Diablo II when suddenly the game froze, then my computer froze -- which forced me to powerdown my computer. After I restarted my computer Windows XP hung at its loading screen, and I was once again forced to powerdown; other attempts yielded the same result. When I tried rebooting in safemode, Windows would load OK, but would freeze when I tried logging in. After that, my BIOS stopped loading (I think it's my BIOS, anyway). That little progress bar that you see when you first start your computer wouldn't finish loading, which consequently froze my computer and forced me to powerdown yet again; other attempts of turning my computer on yielded the same result. Fortunately, I was able to solve the BIOS problem by reseeding my RAM, but that did nothing for the Windows problem. (I forgot to mention that I enabled the error log (POST?) the BIOS normally sends out, and one of the things I remembered it reporting was a thermal event.) Regardless, I had no other options available to me at this point, so I just formated my computer and reinstalled Windows XP, installed SP3, other updates, etc, and all was well, until I tried running ScanDisk. ScanDisk's progress will not move past 23%; it hangs indefinitely. I've tried it two different times. So, for the hell of it I tried deframentating my computer, and that would hang indefinitely at 3%. So, what's going on here? There's one more thing I forgot to mention that may help: Recently I used a secure delete program that overwrote the unused portion of my HDD. Do you think that may have screwed my HDD up? The program is called Sure Delete.

In any case, thanks for reading.

 

[bc4]

you should be able to download your HD manufacturer's maintenance disk and run a program like ScanDisk. each manufacturer has there own program to diagnose a problem. Most of them you can boot directly from a cd

ps. (edit) A thermal event is caused by overheating, hardly ever caused by a hard drive. You may have other issues. List you entire spec's and people will be more likely to help you.

 

[bluekoala]

1. Windows is crap.
2. You don't need sure delete unless you're a recovering child porn collector.
3. Your HDD probably needs a low level format at this point.
4. Dust out all your HSF inside your case to help rule out thermal issues.

Your best bet is to use disk keeper to salvage your HDD.

I recommend never to use secure delete unless it's on an empty hard drive just out of superstition. Who knows what kind of seizure it can cause to your file system.

I would also suggest installing an easy to use linux distribution on your HDD. I've seen ext3 actually fix hard drives that seemed mechanically broken when used with NTFS.

Anyway, HDD are cheap nowadays. I would recommend a WD750GBS SATA2 HDD if your computer scales to it. They're a good bang for buck choice.