First of all, hello to the forum.

Recently I got from my friend, he coudn't solve the problem with it so he asked me about it and I accepted the request. The problem was that it coudn't install neither Win7 (failed at 0% on "expanding files"), nor Win Vista (failed on ~90% of the installation). Windows XP installed fine. Other problem was that in windows xp you coudn't install programs (larger ones, like MS office, etc... skype, opera, foobar went fine) and games. It said that some files or disk is unreadable, in some ways it was CRC.

So after 20-30hours of various tests, both with SW and HW I came to conclusion that MB chipset is defected. But few days later I somehow felt that it could be a RAM. A friend said that he checked but I forgot that he could be wrong, so I did the check. And obviously found that one slot (not RAM!) is faulty. Then I had Win 7 installed with only one stick of RAM, yet I succeded from few tries. First was like ~90% and then it got installed. I coudn't knew wich slot was faulty at that time so it could be due to that I didn't figured it out yet with installing windows 7 again. In windows 7 when I tried 4 different RAM stick of 1GB I realised failure of the slot, because it instantly caused errors with booting skype, some windows errors, foobar, drivers etc... BSOD and booting of OS failures also showed up with that slot of RAM being used.

But still I got same errors when installing bigger programs and games. I tried several programs: HDD regenerator, Spinrite (it found unrecoverable sector, on later scans ehalted due the errors), Victoria, DBAN etc. Victoria actually coudn't recognise my disk. It says "drive not say drsc...." Is there something I am missing or doing wrong? Maybe I am wasting my time with this HDD? I am getting new 2.5" HDD soon, so I could check if it's MB is alright. Actually I check with a good HDD before, but at that time I didn't know about the slot of the RAM failure so it probably failed at 37% of Win7 installation because of that.
Friend also tried this faulty HDD in his laptop and it succeded installing Vista, but he didn't try installing any games or programs... Thank you in advance for you help.

I just tried to install win xp and setup coudn't format (not quick format) the disk.

Quick format succeded

Unfortunately you have given a long story with words (and much information we don't care about e.g. RAM problems - this is not a PC support forum), but not enough detail about the disk problems.

There are many different ways you can supply more information, if you want help - for example: I suggest you start by connecting this "suspect" disk to another (already working) PC, as a secondary disk. Then use HDDScan (either from hddscan.com or from this website) to (a) scan the "suspect" disk to confirm that there are unreadable sectors, and (b) collect the SMART data from the "suspect" disk - you can make a screenshot of that SMART data, which will allow readers here to see the disk's own view of its health.

I tried MHDD and found it out working. But there is a wierd thing, I mean in the port selection, it show that HDD is on PCI port. Is that the same on Victoria? Well, this test was executed on same laptop because I don't have a PC to test it at the moment but I hope it will show something useful or whatever that can be worked on. Thank you for pointing me.

Thanks for the screenshots.


I think that means your laptop SATA controller is in AHCI mode. You are lucky, some SATA controllers in that mode can be used by MHDD. Some other SATA controller can only be used by MHDD when they are switched to IDE / legacy / compatibility mode in the BIOS.

The MHDD scan results show no unreadable sectors.

The SMART results show that there have been 3 previously unreadable sectors, but none were reallocated, and no sectors are known by the drive to be unreadable now.

Therefore I see no evidence of a fault with that disk drive. Based on this evidence you have given, your problems with OS installation etc. are likely to be caused by fault(s) elsewhere on the PC. When you can connect that disk to a known-good PC, then you can perform further tests, without worrying whether any problems are caused by the PC or not.