BleepingComputer.com: Is My Hard Drive Damaged? Help!

About 2 months ago i was merging the partitions of my hard drive when we had a power cut. It had only just started the process. but it managed to delete all the files on the larger partition (200gb) my friend took the hard drive and did some recovery thing to rebuild the FAT. it got some stuff back but not all. Ever since then my computer has been unusually slow. normally would start up fairly instant but now the desktop takes a minute or so to 'warm up'. It also seems slower when opening programs. Could this be a result of some damaged caused?


I have also recently changed my AV softaware from AVG to commodo. Im not sure that this would be causing the slower statup .

Any help would be greatfully recieved.

Cheers

Will

Hard to say what's causing the problem, but I suspect that the failed merge has a lot to do with it. It it were my machine I would probably just back everything up and start fresh with a new partition table.

You may consider trying the fixboot and fixmbr commands in the Windows XP recovery console, but I'm not sure what effect they would have.

Also, the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows includes a utility to repair partitions, you might want to look into that.

To be honest, these are just shots ins the dark, so no guarantees!

to true amazing_andrew - ubcd has some amazing utilities when it comes to this stuff

grab a copy - www.ubcd4win.com - even if you dont use it to fix this specific problem, it is a must have to have laying around

apart from that, i would be running a chkdsk /r (backup your data first)

for physical damage: visit your HDDS manufacture website for their diagnostic tools (seatools for seagate, wd diag for western digital, sd diag for samsung drives)

i guess one of the ebst ways to test would be get a 2nd hdd and do a clean install on it, see how it runs.

goodluck