Repairing a hard drive

Is it possible to repair a hard drive (for free)?

I've tried installing:
Windows XP: Home Edition
Debian
Gentoo
Mandrake

But none of them worked. It's definitely a hard drive problem. How can I fix the problem?

I don't know what the problem is.

Um...get a new hard drive? But that's not free...

You could also try a really big magnet {^_^}...

Are you sure it is a hard drive problem?

I am positive that it is a hard drive problem. I'm using a computer that I built recently (with all up to date, fast, and powerful parts). I'm using an old hard drive. It works just fine. I tried using an older hard drive, to put a different operating system on, but it didn't work.

Either the operating system was installed but unusable, or just didn't install.

It didn't install with Mandrake (I got an error) or Gentoo (I received a bunch of errors and nothing worked.)

It installed with Debian (but basically nothing worked) and Windows XP: Home Edition (I could only log in once. Basically nothing worked. A lot of stuff wasn't even installed. I restarted the computer and it didn't even load Windows properly.

I want to get a new hard drive. I just can't afford one. Is there any way to fix this hard drive (for free)?

You could try a low level format (ie full zero write).

Recently my HDD was buggered to the point that my motherboard didn't even detect the HDD on boot-up.
I was about to give up but decided to give it another go and plugged it into a PCI ATA controller and voila. It had thousands of bad sectors but a low level format solved that. I've been running SuSE on it for a few weeks now and all's good.

Anyway, download the proper software for your HDD drive from the company website and do a low level format.

However that's just a possibility since there could be multiple different things wrong with a HDD. This is just one of them.

Could someone help me get the appropriate thing to fix my hard drive?

I have a:
Seagate
Medalist 6531
Model ST36531A
6,448 Mbytes

Are you talking about the software I was talking about?

if so, check out DicsWizard and SeaTools here http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/utils.html

I ran SeaTools on the hard drive. I received a lot of bad sectors (that weren't able to be fixed).

Is there anything else I can do to fix the hard drive (for free) before giving up all hope for it?

Most in not all (I'm pretty sure it's all) bad sectors can be fixed simply by doing a low-level format (zero fill).

Get DriveWizard instead of SeaTools.
Now when you boot into DiskWizard (takes a while) select 'Utilities'. Then select 'Zero Fill Drive (Full)'.

Be careful if you have multiple HDD's inside. Make sure you don't wipe the wrong one.

Seatools might have the same function (I'm not sure) but I'm familiar with DriveWizard so that's the program I use and suggest.

That didn't work. After I was finished using the DriveWizard, I tried installing Microsoft Windows XP: Home Edition. It didn't work. The hard drive wasn't able to format the partition. This always happens.

What do you suggest I do now?

My guess is that the only thing I can do now, is call warranty-support at Seagate and hope that my warranty is still there.

The hard drive is really old.

Just a thought, did you try partitioning about 97% of your drive as a primary dos drive and using the remainder for a logical dos drive then format c:?
then try re-installing an OS, this can also help to fix bad sectors

MostDef: How do I do that? (step by step)

Boot up with bootdisk of choice, and run the fdisk command. agree to large file format, then choose to create a primary dos partition, once the drive has been verified youll be asked if u want to use all available space, choose no, and input the size to about 97% of the hard drive capacity

esc out to the main fdisk options, create an extended dos partition with remaining 3% space, make this drive logical and active

reboot pc, and run a format c: command

This should format the c: drive and repair the bad sectors too, it does take a while howerver and is not guarantyeed to work every time, depending on the exact nature of the problem

You guys are burning a lot of brain cells over a 6GB drive that's been out of warranty for years.

Dude, it's a bad drive! You've done all you can to try and "fix" it. Let it RIP and move on.


data4t
http://www.howtorecoverdata.com

couldn't agree more with data4t.

It is a mis-statement to say low level "fixes" bad sectors.

Bad sectors are physical surface defects of the drives' platters. At the factory bad sectors are put into a defect map and those locations are mapped to spare sectors designed for this purpose.

After a lowlevel you would want to partition and format the drive. Using chkdsk /f or scandisk/through you can have the defects mapped out from the file allocation tables. This will provide usable space.

But if any defects land in the beginning tracks you are hosed. If you have a large defect amount and the drive is older, it is foolish to waste time on a drive that will continue to degrade and will lose your data due to this failure.