Hi guys,

I have just seen you web and I thought someone may help me. I have two ATA drives on my PC. Primary master Maxtor 160 gb and Slave St 20 GB. I have a problem installing Windows XP in my maxtor drive, the setup stops just when about it completes copying the files into the installation folders. I tried cloning the ST drive into maxtor through norton ghost but the process stops in the beginning saying that some sectors might be bad.
Can someone please suggest me what can I do?

Thanks in advance

Hi buqja85,

Welcome to PCHF.

You can't actually fix bad sectors on a disk, as these are physical problems with the drive itself. Bad sectors usually indicate the disk has been hit, overheating, or could be failing. What disk utilities normally do with bad sectors it to mark that particular area as bad, so that no data is ever written to that area of the disk.

After formatting, you can run a scan on the disk. If you have the disk as a secondary drive on a working Windows XP machine, go to My Computer, right click on the disk with the bad sectors, Properties, Tools tab, and click on Check Now under "Error Checking". Tick "Automatically fix file system errors" and "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors".

Thank you for the reply, I am not sure if it is bad sectors but I am wondering if I can somehow fix the problem mentioned in the first post. How can I install the Win XP because when the problem first appeared windows xp was loading very slow.. Is there any utility tool or smth that can help me around this because as far as I am concerned I havent damaged the hdd in any way.

To be honest, checking for bad sectors would be the first thing to check for, also make sure the installation CD your using is not copied or scratched. For it to crash during the Windows setup suggests a media problem of some kind, either the HDD or the CD itself. During the Windows setup, have you tried removing the partition, and then recreating it? Was the solution I offered in the first post possible?

You must buy new HDD :-). When you have some bad sectors on HDD, its time to buy a new one.