Think the Hard Drive in my Dell 8400 is dead - help!!

[Geoggy]

Been having a few problems over the last few months with my PC.

I lost the HD with a corrupt registry.

Thankfully I had bought a USB drive and had all my data backed up.

Since then, after reformatting the Maxtor drive in my 8400, the performance has been patchy and i get a lot of "blue screens of death" with "physical memory dumps" hapenning.

Yesterday, the registry went on me again and XP would not load. I ran CHKDSK and it came back that there were lots of problems it couldnt fix.

It then did boot into XP and I have been able today to fix a lot of the registry problems and run anotehr back up of all my data.

I set chkdsk /r to run on reboot and it came back with hundreds and hundreds of segments that are unreadable.

The pc is running like a dog.

Does this sounds like a dead HD? It does to me.

So the question is - what do I need to replace it?

I no nowt about internal HD's - i dont know my sata from my ide.

All help much appreciated.

Thanks

:notworthy

[D J Fryer]

Geoggy - having had problems with my 8400 recently I had both of my SATA Maxtor HD's swapped out by Dell. When the PC boots - hit F12 to go to the boot menu, choose Hard Drive Diagnostics run the test and see what the result is. Dell support will ask you to do this anyway I would have thought - however be warned that their solution seems to invove formatting to try and repair the drive so you need to have your data backed up.

If the drive is a Maxtor then you can also download the free Powermax diagnostic utility from Maxtor.com and create a bootdisk floppy that you can test the drive with more thoroughly.