My laptop failed two diagnostic tests for the hard drive. The hard drive is a Hitachi_DK23AA-51. The tests that I ran were through diagnostic utilities provided by Compaq...which is now HP I believe...anyways...The tests returned the following errors: Test failed Error: Hard Drive 1: Sequential Verify Test: test failed error code: 011002103 failed Verify Command Time of Error: 9:40 PM 3/4/06 Diagnostics for Windows 4.12A Error Details: Track=635 Head=3 BIOS Return Code=0x0011 And..... Test failed Error: Hard Drive 1: Seqential Read Test: test failed error code: 017002000 Failed Read Time Error: 9:43 PM 3/4/06 Diagnostics for Windows 4.12A Error Details: Track=765 Head=5 Sector=21 BIOS Return Code=0x0011 Any light that anyone can shed on this "little" situation I have would be greatly appreciated

Sounds like it's bad. Were you having problems with it before running the tests? You might want to download Disk Manager for IBM drives. I believe that covers hitatchi drives. Running that file creates bootable disks to run tests on the drive. It should also have a zero fill and maybe a low level format if you need to wipe the drive and start over. Occasionally that fixes drive problems.

Before you run any more tests, do you have anything you want to save before you wipe everything out? Some tests are destructive.

Time for a new drive, obviously.

NC State College http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/ BIOS Return Code=0x0011 Is a failing hard drive. Send me a private message on computing.net and I will e-mail you a program.

Sometimes you can simply repartition a drive such as this. I've got one that I simply arbitrarily reduced the size of the partition to two separate partitions of somewhat smaller total capacity than that of the entire drive. This evidently changes the geometry of things like the boot sector enough that you can sometimes avoid "bad" spots. I've got one like this I've been using for 3 years. I DO however, back it up frequently. If it was to fai......