Do I need a new hard drive?

[garlictartar]

http://www.overclock.net/t/1287846/can-some-diagnose-this-error/10#post_17819589

My ram is fine but chkdsk found a lot of bad sectors right away, and the scan took all night to finish.

will a new hard drive fix this problem?

(I am supercow, but somebody stole my name for Tom's lol)

chkdsk did successfully complete and the laptop is now usable, but it is crazy slow and freezes easily.

 

[WyomingKnott]

If chkdsk is not damaged, it is indeed the drive.

In _any_ case, the first thing to do is copy your data to an external drive. I don't know if you have a laptop or a desktop, but in either case I would borrow another computer, download any free backup utility (Clonezilla, EASEUS ToDo backup, any of a dozen others) and build a boot CD or thumb drive. Attach an external drive to your PC, boot to the bootable media you made, and copy the internal drive to the external. Make an "image" backup that can be restored to make a bootable disk.

Of course, you could use the machine with the problem to do this, but every write cycle (download the software and run it) might do damage. I'm slightly paranoid.

Then, if you want, you can download the full diagnostics from the disk mfg and get a fuller idea of what is wrong. It is barely conceivable that your problem is with something else, a cable or the disk controller, but unlikely.

Then you put the new disk in the machine, boot to the media you made, restore the backup you made, and boot away.

SuperMoo.

 

[garlictartar]

Best answer selected by garlictartar.