It is possible to get a diagnostic utility from your hard disk
manufacturer's Website. This will give you a number of options but to
be sure you will need to use the an option which writes all possible
patterns to the disk. This is the only way you can be sure of the disk,
scandisk may pass the disk if it is failing on a particular pattern of
data in one sector but the utility will pcik this up. Note that this
WILL destroy all of the data on your disk and it is not possible to
recover anything. If you are prepared to repartition and reformat the
whole disk then this is not a problem. But if there is more than your
E: drive on the disk then you will need to back up everything. 

If the disk fails this, and I am sure it will then look for a repair
option. If there isn't one then use the erase / clear option. This will
map any bad sectors found from your hard disk and in most cases will
replace them with spare ones.
All of these operations will take a long time with a 200GB disk. (Hours
not Minutes)

How long your hard disk repair will last depends upon the reason for
the original failure. It may only be a defective sector from
manufacture which was missed. I have had disks last for over two years
after this procedure.

Of course if the disk is still under guarantee you can replace it if it
fails the first test. The choice is yours.

Note that the manufacturers guarantee on most disks is now only 1
year.

One final comment which may be obvious but if you have more than one
disk in your machine make sure you choose the right one when you run
the utility. This is a kill or cure option and is therefore dangerous
if you are not very careful.


-- 
MrStan
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MrStan's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1771
View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22598

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