Thread: Hard Disk Problem

I have a problem with my new hard disk. My system has an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB RAM, Nvidia 8600GT Graphics card and 160 GB HDD. I am using Windows XP SP2. Recently I bought a new Seagate 500 GB HDD (internal SATA drive) around five months ago and connected it to my system. It was basically used for my movie collection. I partitioned it using my XP bootable CD. The biggest partition was 300 GB and now it is completely full. Only 5 GB is available as free space. Now I'm receiving errors on this drive. I performed a disk check using default Windows CHKDSK utility. After restarting, the disk checking hangs on the third stage. It passed stage 1 and 2 without any issues.

When I skip the CHKDSK procedure, it works fine, but sometimes the drive hangs again and I have to restart the computer. I tried checking the drive wish TuneUp utilities 2009, but it also crashes at the end of checking. I don't want lose 300 GB worth of data. Also backing-up the entire data is not possible as I don't have a spare hard drive. Are there any other options that I can try? Thanks.

Your hard drive seems to be in a bad shape and your data is definitely at high risk. You would need to backup the data as fast as possible. Ask a friend or your office administrators if they can help you in this situation and lend you an external/ internal hard drive for some time. Else you would have to backup the data to DVDs. Once all the data is backed up, repartition the drive and reformat the partitions completely. Download a utility which can scan the entire hard drive for bad sectors and repair them. You can try Norton Disk Doctor, HOD regenerator or Hard Drive Test Pilot for scanning the drive. As you have mentioned that the hard drive is barely five months old, you should send the hard drive back to the company or dealer and have it replaced under warranty.