Hard Drive Issue with Windows XP

[I]

The general effect and specific effect it has is to write 0's to the whole hdd ereasing all partitions/info,

If windows recognized (perhaps even created) the filesystem it's writing to, there should be no need to erase it.

it is quite possible that the errors that you are having with your hdd are logical errors caused by repeat writing of data to a particular spot on the hdd,

There is no expectation the same data gets written to same spot, the HDD itself will detect and remap physically bad sectors, and "repeated writing" is the whole purpose of a hard drive, not a cause for failure merely by trying to install windows a couple (or dozens) times.

these can sometimes show up as bad blocks which the os cannot handle thus the need for overwriting the whole hdd with 0's.

No that will NOT make them show up as bad blocks.

Please note: That many hdd's that are rma'd fall into this catagory.if the manufacture's [Western digital ??] utility cannot fix "0" the hdd it will generate an error report for you to rma the hdd.

Actually no. By the time there is a real failure that has exhausted all spare sectors and triggers a smart warning, that's the beginning and end, there was no need to try writing zeros, it is not a requirement stipulated by any HDD RMA policy, and is merely one of many many things you could do which if it fails, would trigger an error code.

Also writing 0's to the hdd will result in a totally clean hdd,almost like new...
[Should be done every 2 to 3 years because ...

There is nothing useful about this supposed "totally clean" HDD, opposed to one that had a few "1" instead of all zeros. Maybe if you wanted to prevent a layman from data recovery that would work but there are automated utils that will multipass random write so even then it's not so useful.

Zeroing a drive is typically done only to get rid of a logical partition, boot sector or other type of problem set by a software that you can't undo. For example, can't get DOS FDISK to wipe out a linux partition and don't know to use (or don't have) a linux boot disk? Zeroing will do it. Have a nasty boot sector virus? Zero it out.

If windows creates a partition & filesystem and your installation gets stuck, there is no reason to believe that zeroing the drive then starting over to install windows, won't result in the exact same logical disk configuration as before.

Otherwise, it is absolutely not necessary to do it every 2 or 3 years.

If the health of the drive is in question the HDD manufacturer's utility may be useful, to check for smart errors flag, to do simple diagnostic, and a long whole drive surface test. This latter test is more useful than writing zeros alone, and completely supersedes it.

This is all beside the point though, that it is not likely to be a HDD problem causing failure only at certain points partway into a windows installation. Windows scans the drive for logical problems and a physical problem is either remapped after first time or the drive is shot already, zeroing won't bring it back.

If you find you are continually (supposedly) needing to zero hard drives, you should take a look at what you are doing differently than everybody else because the typical system, especially including the millions that have had windows installed, do not need their HDDs zeroed ever, not even once over the life of the system which may include more than one HDD.

 

[zjohnr]

FWIW ... which in this case is not much since I don't have much depth with hard drives ... I agree with "I". (BTW, nice post, I) Spending hours tediously zeroing out the drive is unlikely to do you much good. The benefit is not likely to be worth the cost of the time invested.

If you want to zero out the drive anyway, go ahead but use the WD diagnostics disk to do it and use the "quick" method. But a better place to start is to simply run the manufacturer diagnostics. This may not be sufficient to resolve the problem. But it would at least provide another clue to help narrow done the search for what is going wrong.

-john, the essentially clueless redundant legacy dinosaur