I recently bought and installed a new 20 gb hd, but when I ran scandisk on it, a bunch of bad sectors were found. I thought it was just a compatibility thing between scandisk and the drive, but now whenever I run scandisk, it says scandisk cannot read from the last sector on drive c. This had seemed like a minor problem until two days ago, when I installed a music synthesizer program I found on cnet. When it said you need to restart to complete installation, I chose no, so I could install another synthesizer program, and only have to restart once. I turned it off, and when I turned it on the next day, I got the message setup is updating your configuration files. Then it said sector not found reading drive c. So I can't start in windows or in safe mode, but I do have a boot disk. I boot into dos from a disk, and I can get into the c drive just fine. But when I go into the program files folder of the program I just downloaded, say dir, it says sector not found reading drive c. So is this a hard drive problem? Or is it from the software? Thanks in advance for any help.

Hopefully you can download a hard drive diagnostic from the manufacturers website.

It sounds like a Hard Drive problem to me. The fact that scan disk had giving you a warning before you even downloaded this new program leads me to believe its the Hard Drive. As far as incompatibility with scan disk only the most obscure brands have problems with scan disk. At this point you might want to contact the manufacturer of the HDD for some diagnostic software, or replacement of the part. You might be able to save the hard drive if you reformat it. If you reformat all the information in the HDD will be lost unless you back it up. Good luck Gio

This sounds silly but get up close to the PC and dir that folder . If you can hear a faint tick tick tick from the HDD then it is geĆcked .

If the HD was configured wrong in the bios or it was too big for the bios, scandisk may have marked the extra space bad. You're using fat32 right?

Thanks for all the replies. I am using FAT32, and windows detects tha drive at 18.5 gb, but hte BIOS says 20.3 gb. I don't know if I messed up configuring it, but scandisk does say that the drive may need LBA enabled. It is enabled in the BIOS, but did it need to be configured that way sometime during setup? Is there something I missed in fdisk? I just partitioned it as PRI DOS and formatted it in windows. Thanks.

Couple of questions: Did the drive have any other OS or partitioning on it previous, or did you buy it new? Also, did you go with only one partition when you set it up with fdisk?