Harddisk dead?

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A couple of weeks ago, while running my Pascal project, the computer suddenly went into the ‘blue screen of death’, so I had to reboot. Well, at least I tried. It wouldn’t load up Windows, no matter what. Eventually I tried to reinstall Windows98, that wouldn’t allow me to do it. I tried to format my harddisk (between each fullstop there are a couple of hard struggling hours with my computer), it wouldn’t allow me either, it just got stuck. Eventually I fdisk-ed, then formatted and then reinstalled Win98. That worked. However, from then on,whenever I booted up to Windows it would take me more than 5-6 minutes to do it. It was frustrating. I haven’t touched my computer after that for a week or so. Last Friday I needed to work with it, so I tried to boot it up. It got stuck on the Windows cloudy screen. I rebooted. After that I have the message to go to the DOS prompt and perform a scandisk as there might be errors on my harddisk. I did that too. From Friday evening until Saturday evening it worked trough this scandisk until I got the message ‘Out of memory’. And what did the Scandisk find before that? Over 2000 bad clusters. It simply filled the first two ‘lines’ of the checked area with ‘B’s (bad clusters). Now anything I do, I can’t boot up to Windows. I am stuck in the same DOS prompt screen, and it drives me nuts. Do you think my hard disk is dead, should I buy another one or there is some hope, still?
Please help, I am good in software but hardware stuff is just not my thing…
Thanks…

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To paraphrase John Cleese, I strongly suspect you have a Norwegian Blue….
I think you’ve answered your own question – that many bad clusters and it’s not worth keeping. Even if you managed to ‘mark bad’ all the bad clusters and recover a few, the likelihood of it crashing again just doesn’t make it worth the effort.

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Ok, thanks for your quick reply and confirmation…I am heading now to the store to buy a new disk…

Cheers,
Kislany

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Ayup, your disk is dead.

I had that happen almost two years ago.

If your system is still under warranty, you should be able to get a free replacement.

Otherwise, disk drives have really come down in price the last few years.

Take a look at http://www.dirtcheapdrives.com[/url%5D, http://www.insight.com[/url%5D and http://www.buy.com[/url%5D, as well as using a price search engine once you decide what drive you want.
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