Laptop Hard Drive

Okay I recently bought a dell c400 laptop of Ebay.

With no floppy and no Optical drive I had to do a network install. Well I finally figured out how to do a network install of XP without using RIS, and I am having chkdsk errors every reboot. As well as some windows issues like All Programs not bringing up anything, and a HTML error when I tried to open control panel. (It only happened once though)

I just booted up in DOS and ran spinrite, and it warned me that the "SMART" reported the hard drive at imminent failure! (Although the SMART data only showed one thing I did not recognize out of spec... )

Anyway, obviously one thinks, okay its the hard drive right?

My question is, before I got windows installed I was running Ubuntu with no problems what so ever.

So..

Does Linux have no built in disk checking utilities so it did not know there was a problem??

Or is it something more simple like having used that wierd File System that the FAT partition didnt "take"

One last question

Is there a way I can format the HDD in native 4K NTFS from DOS, so that I can do the network install of XP? The only setup option was for convert FAT to NTFS, which to me is a big no no.

TIA

Another question. I am doing a low level format now to see if I can salvage the drive.

But if it is damaged, I was checking dell website to see what optional HDD types there are. All 5 are 4200rpm.

How can I tell what the max supported HDD is> I upgraded to A12 bios, and am not worried about getting a 100GB Hdd, something around 40 will be more then enough for me. But can i get a 5400 or even a 7200rpm 2.5" hdd and it will work?

Thanks

As long as you get a drive the that physically fits into the laptop and has the standard laptop IDE connector, it should work no matter what the RPM.

Sweet, I may upgrade it anyway.

Ran a couple of LL formats 2 Scandisk surface tests and then convert converted to NTFS, and I have not had one problem.

Got windows reinstalled lickety split