you could go to the harddrives manufacturers website and download their harddrive testing utility.

 

Hi Sobeit,

Got a feeling this thread may need moving to security.

Downloaded Seatools for Dos, burned ISO to disk, tried to boot the pc with it and got this message;

InitDiskillegal partition table - drive 00 sector 0

While i was Googling it, the machine eventually decided to boot with Seatools and i'm now running the long drive self test but wondering if there is any point. Seems like i may have a Rootkit;

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/01/new_nasty_hides_from_windows_a.html

That was the only English result returned by Google.

 

Just a thought, if it passes the sea tools test, possibly try replacing the IDE ribbon or SATA cable. This can sometimes show up as what you think is a bad hard drive but ends up being the cable. Also run sea tools more than once but it sounds like your drive is bad, time to backup and move on.

 

Thanks Compstar, and welcome to TSF.

Posted in security forum and when i put everything together i think the HDD is kaput and yes, i think i should move on. Luckily, i don't use the pc for anything that may need backing up so its not as big a deal as it would be to some.

Thanks very much for the input. :wave:

 

Thanks for the warm welcome Deejay. I read a lot on here but should post more. Sorry I couldn't be of more assistance.

Just a final thought, have you tried to reformat the drive and re-install the OS? You could also get a little boot cd called Hiren's boot disk. This has hard drive diag tools built into it and much more. I know how hard it is to get rid of those old computers that you know have a couple years left for basic use.