hard disk check results

[rockystone]

Hello

My laptop shuts down without any message & some times it just get freezed. I updated my windows VISTA through windows update. Now the error message shown during boot up is failed to load winload file- Repair the windows. I took out the harddrive & connected to my brother's laptop. I ran disk check & following results are shown. It found 1 bad cluster. Do i need to change my hardisk?

Diskcheck results are attached.

Please help!!!!

Attachments

[digitalferret]

hi rockystone

it might be a good idea to download and run a drive diagnostic utility and see what information it yields.

You could try the drive manufacturers website or run a generic one such as MHDD available from hddguru downloads or from such Live CD's as UBCD or Hiren and so on.

These are designed to run direct from CD or Floppy and set to boot before Windows kicks in.

Depending upon results this could also be a good time to back up data if you haven't already and look for a new drive.

K

[warnerr]

Usual cause of this issue is a sector has failed. Best choice is to duplicate drive doing a sector by sector copy to a new drive using a product that can deal with bad sectors. The clone can then usually be easily fixed. An example of such a product is MHDD that you can download from the files section of this website. The drive is likely degrading and continuing to analyze issues can lead to more data loss.

[lcoughey]

Before you do anything further, start by making sure your data is backed up.

Personally, I wouldn't risk running my system on a questionable drive and would use it as an excuse to do a fresh OS install on my system with a new drive. You can then try the manufacturer's tools to see if you can scan and "fix" the drive for another use, after you make sure your data is backed up or (at the very least) fully restored onto the new drive.