How to find problem in hard disk

[ravisekhar9]

Hello . . .

I am facing this HDD problem for many days. thought it might be RAM and increased it but still the problem exists...

my problem is it is taking very long time to start up and very very long time to shut down !! and when it is in use red color LED is supposed to be blinking but it stays ON continuously, friends said it is due to bad sectors and they can't be fixed and have to purchase new HDD.

and is that true that bad sectors are virtual (partition) only and not physical and will not be spread like a virus from one HDD to another ???

pls clarify my doubts and provide suitable solutions . . .

thank you

Ravi Sekhar Veenam

 

[phil22]

Bad sectors on a hard drive will not spread to another drive, they have nothing to do with viruses. They are simply caused by wear-and-tear and will gradually get worse (more bad sectors will appear on that same drive) until eventually the drive will fail completely.

It is unavoidable and happens to all hard drives eventually. If you want to know if the drive is starting to fail you can test it with the manufacturer's diagnostic software. When testing a system drive (the drive on which Windows is installed) you must use DOS software which loads from a bootable CD. The links are here:
http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287

Use IMGBurn to create the CD from the ISO file: http://www.filehippo.com/download_imgburn/