Hard drive dead or just corrupted?

[jim_e]

PC working fine earlier today. I shut it down properly, but then when going to turn it on again when I came back it took ages (literally, 5 mins to open XP) to do anything. The mouse and keyboard wouldn't work but the normal startup procedure happened (including CoreTemp opening and showing CPU temps below 40C, so not the CPU thats gone) but in slow motion and without network connecting.

After a few dead ends I suspected the hard drive could be at fault so I installed XP again on a 2nd partition (I have three: XP, Backup (which contained an image of the xp partition from a few days ago, and Data) - worked absolutelty fine. I ran a chkdsk on the original XP partition and got a whole load of File record segment #### is unreadable.

System:

Q6600
2Gb RAM
P35-DS3R
etc.

System is only about a week old.

The hard drive is a Western Digital 400GB AAKS drive, which has not been dropped or bashed or treated in any way that could cause it to go wrong.

So is it just a case of restoring from backup or will I need to replace the drive?

 

[rpstewart]

Check it over with WD's diagnostic program to be sure.

The fact that it shut down cleanly but didn't start properly thereafter is a bit suspect. Normally you'd be unsurprised if you saw this sort of thing after a forced shutdown but after a clean one is a bit unusual.

 

[jim_e]

WD's diagnostic found the dead sectors and fixed them apparantly, so all is well