Possible dying HDD

[liftedcj7on44s]

guys im having alot of trouble with my PC.
I was on a windows vista 64 bit install. Got a new HD4870 video card. Put it in the system and proceeded to reinstall vista. I notice that it seemed to take longer to install vista then normal. well after vista was installed i installed all drivers. Installed the driver for the Video card. Restarted and it was taking a really really long time to boot. Finally booted up and i proceeded to install the updates from Microsoft. Installed SP1. rebooted and the PC would never boot again. From then i could never get vista to reinstall. So i installled XP and it ran fine. Well i couldnt access my spare HDD in xp home because it was a foreign disk and i couldnt initialize it. So i tried vista again. it would get to the point to where it was installed and was going to run the performance tool and would come up with a error. Was a software error it said cant really remember. Booted back up and it ran chkdsk and fixed all kinds of errors.
Here is what i have came up with.
http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg54/onesick94hb/HDDdying.jpg

Is this repairable?? I am back in vista now but its still taking forever to install and im afraid to install any drivers because i may lose it again.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Replace that HDD and IMO, even if SMART passes, can still be bad!

It's IMO bad if you get major dips in speed, in spots when benching with HD Tach or HD Tune!

[liftedcj7on44s]

I decided to run chkdsk on the drive with vista. it found all sorts of bad sectors. It made it to step 4 of 5 and was at 17% and sat there for over an hour with the HDD light constantly on. So needless to say i am back on XP. Gonna have to run this til i can get a new drive. I cant install to my 2nd harddrive because vista doesnt recognize it. XP does but not vista.

[liftedcj7on44s]

Ok would writing zero's to the drive help any?

[RJARRRPCGP]

Ok would writing zero's to the drive help any?

Probably not, with the symptom of Chkdsk sitting at one place when using Chkdsk,
I would expect the dreaded click-of-death shortly, if not already!

It already looks far worse than just slowness here and there. Back up immediately!

[liftedcj7on44s]

OK writing zeros to the drive did absolutely nothing. I have a new HDD and Vista seems to be running normal now. A question though. I would like to scan the HDD and find out exactly where the bad sectors are. I would like to maybe try to use the drive as storage got music(my 80 gigger is about full). Can i do this??? Maybe find the sectors and partition the drive so that i can leave out the sectors so they wont be used?

[liftedcj7on44s]

wow i feel like im just talking to myself here.

[JamesXP]

You have probably ran out of spare sectors, this happended with my old drive, I couldn't even install windows XP..

time for RMA/New drive

[RollingThunder]

wow i feel like im just talking to myself here.

Lift,

Bad sectors are physical damage, can't be fixed no matter how many times you write zeros to it.

Spinrite from Gibson Research will isolate bad sectors to prevent them from being written to but it's not a free program (V6 $90) and with the amount you are finding with only checkdsk, it's only a matter of time before it's toasted entirely. With the cost of good hard drives today, it's not worth messing with it.

Take the good advice the other guys have given here and RMA the drive if you can.