Bad sectors?

[DaveOwl]

My PC has recently been out of action for 7 months though I have now got it up and running. I changed the motherboard, PSU and put in a new graphics card. Of course I had to install a new copy of Windows XP due to having a new motherboard but since I did that my boot up times are ridiculously long - I'm talking about 3-4 minutes or so here.

The majority of the time is spent on the black screen with the white bars before the Windows XP logo appears (with the blue moving bar) and all the time I can hear a repeating noise from the drive which doesn't sound good. I wouldn't say clicking, though it sounds like it's struggling to read/write from whatever gets read when Windows starts up.

I suppose it might be time to order a new drive soon (lacking money even for a drive for a while!) though what would you suggest in the meantime, is it likely bad sectors have developed since the PC was last on? I don't 100% know what is loaded when Windows boots up but I suspect it must be a part of the installation which is 'hard to read'.

Any ideas? I'm thinking possibly trying Recovery Console and checking the MBR. I have a Seagate SATA 120GB drive.

 

[Snapshot]

You're long past the MBR as the PC is well into the boot sequence. I agree it sounds like bad sectors and I wouldn't go on using the drive in case it gets worse. If you have a DVD/RW, take a Ghost image then run chkdsk /f on the drive to see that will remove any bad sectors. Only consider this a temporary fix, though, and buy a new drive as soon as you can afford it.

Jonathan

 

[DaveOwl]

Using fixboot in the Recovery Console actually sorted the slow booting problem. Running Seagate Tools though shows the drive as having a SMART error and bad sectors. CHKDSK though doesn't find any bad sectors at all on the whole disk, even with the most thorough scan options so I assume the drive is automatically mapping spare sectors which is why it can't find a problem?

Another question which is most important is who the 5 year warranty is with when you buy an OEM drive? I checked on the Seagate website and it seems I can't RMA this drive to them even though I've had it far less than this time. I've just bought another drive to replace it which is OEM, so should I be bugging the etailer or Seagate if this one messes up?