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Jedi Phoenix

Someone help me with hard drives again, please...


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I'm getting fed up with all this shit. I have only one functional hard drive on which I can install an OS, and that one has bad sectors. I was looking for good programs to allocate those bad sectors as usual, but all of them want to use the built in chkdsk shit that Windows has, and that one just sweeps through it like a lazy janitor, telling me that nothing's wrong with it. Well fuck you chkdsk, that hard drive is making fucking LOUD clicking noises so don't try to tell me it's allright. My problem is, everytime I reinstall XP, it just has to find a bad sector to write some seriously important driver over it. And if it doesn't, it'll make up for it by moving some of them to a bad one. I'm not fucking making this up...

 

I started up an older indie game I had on this PC called Saira thgough Steam, only for the game to install some directx shit without problems and enter the game for 1-2 seconds before giving me a BSOD that I can't even read, and restarting the PC. Next thing I know, my mouse is gone. Not just simply not working, but no pointer at all. Trying to reinstall the driver, I assume, only results in this shit installing it over the same bad sector all the time, or it just tries to install it from a corrupted installer. It doesn't matter anyways, as it's not giving me a chance to choose the install disk to install the driver from. And this is only one of the problems. In the last 1 month, I shit you not, I had to reinstall Win XP 6 times. Sometimes it was just me waking up, starting it up, only to have it hang on the startup screen. Even in safemode. Sometimes it deleted my graphics driver, and didn't let me install another. Sometimes, it flooded me with error messages about random dlls not starting up and then froze. And the best one was when it kept shutting down unimportant programs such as explorer.exe... The funny thing is, these mostly happened after booting up the PC, playing some JKA and some other indie thing, then shutting it down. Nothing was installed, nothing was changed, yet it fucked up everything bigtime, just out of random.

 

I tried various programs to see the bad sectors on the drive, but they aren't worth shit because they all use chkdsk, and thus they say there's nothing wrong with it. Is there an actual good program to allocate bad sectors out there? Please tell me about it if you know one...

 

As for the other hard drives, it seems like they simply aren't a good combo with my Abit motherboard and this shittiest OS of all fucking history, since it simply won't install to any of them. I have a 40GB IDE oldie, which is slow but stable, but it won't continue the install process once I'm out of the blue screen part of the thing. It just won't. The other, 300GB SATA one is, according to the installer, not a Windows compatible drive. Good fucking riddance, since it wasn't even formatted since the last XP was put onto it, I just simply deleted the windows files. The funniest shit is that it won't even install to any other drives if it's connected...

 

TL;DR, recommend me a good and actually functional program that really does allocate bad sectors on a hard drive, without using chkdsk. I'm broke and I can't even afford a single DVD these days, so I must cope with this bad drive for now. Any help is appreciated. For now, I gotta go and reinstall this shit for the seventh time.

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A hard drive with bad sectors is as much use as a cardboard spanner and will die completely at any time loosing everything. There is no magical piece of software that will physically isolate the bad sectors. Get yourself an 120GB SSD system drive for around $113 and I guarantee you won't have any of these problems again. This is one of those perks in life where you have to fork out a bit more then you can afford otherwise your going to spend all your time reinstalling a corrupt/unstable windows.

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It's kinda hard to do when I have no income at all. Believe me, I'd love to do it, but I can't.

 

Is there a program that at least can show me the bad sectors though? Maybe I can mess around with partitions, and create a smaller, possibly (more) clear one. I realized that the windows formatter only hangs a little at around 1-8% and then maybe at 30-something too. 

 

This is not a new issue though, and I only recently found out why it (and my other HDs as well) died so easily. The reason is just a 3-word phrase which is also kind of a swear word: Mercury power supply. For long and long years I didn't notice that 3 out of 4 cables that the PSU provides inside the housing have contact issues. This didn't bother my trusty old 80 GB drive, as it kind of made a clicking noise, then shrugged it off, and continued working. The 300 GB ones were more whiney, and stopped working at a whim when facing such troubles. The result was a lot of bad sectors, obviously, and it kept piling up. Now I isolated all 3 bad cables and I'm living off the remaining one, which can support 2 SATA drives at the same time, pretty steadily too. Quite the pickle.

 

But to be fair, this hard drive was dying for years now, it can take a few more months. It's just that, it would be nice if those few months didn't have like 41243 new XP reinstalls necessarily.

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