IS my hard drive bad?
 

I have a hard that I thought had crashed, and I just felt like seeing if I could recover some of my old files off of it. so I hooked it up to my old win2k machine and it worked fine, so I ran file scavenger basically all day yesterday on the 2 partitions on it and I didn't have a single problem with the hard drive the entire time I was working with it. Which is making me wonder if it may not have been a hardware problem.

It' is a 120 Gb Samsung spinpoint ~1-2 years old
I had been using it in an XP machine when I thought it had crashed.
I'll try to answer any other questions that may help.


Basically what I am asking is how can I know if the drive is bad and how can I check if it is still good to use.

If you are able to see it from the other machine and recover data, it's probably still good. Just a glitch in the OS.

Re-format it and see if it still works.

If you feel like spend a couple of bucks ($90 actually) then go here to get Spinrite from Gibson Research. It is worth the money to save a drive.

RE:
 

If you could read from the drive then it may only be a portion of the HD that is broken. If you have got *all* the files you need try formating and reinstalling. Usually a format will mark bad sectors of the disk keeping them from being written to. You could also try downloading Knoppix linux (live CD) to recover if nesscessary. If your HD is bad though I would just buy a new one. Outpost.com usually has good weekly specials on HD's.

Hope this helps.

mark

if you can read from the drive, then it's probably not the HD that's messed up. Does the rest of your computer work (try putting a different HD in)