[vox-tech] failing hard drive...

[Jonathan Stickel]

It looks like I have a failing hard drive.  I've never experienced this 
before; I guess I have been lucky.  The hard drive is a 160 GB Maxtor 
ATA drive purchased and installed in a custom built desktop pc a few 
years ago (2003?).

The first partition is NTFS with winXP installed.  I have several more 
partitions for Linux and data (reiserfs and FAT32).  Only the NTFS 
partition is experiencing problems at the moment.  Windows no longer 
boots.  Using the repair console of the windows installation disk, a 
chkdsk /r reports "unrecoverable errors".  Not trusting windows tools, I 
ran Maxtor's PowerMax self-booting utility.  An advanced scan reports 
"device is failing" with not much more information.  File system checks 
of all the other partitions report no errors.

So I must have bad sectors somewhere in the physical region of the first 
partition.  Will this problem get worse and propagate to my other 
partitions?  I see several non-free programs on the web that advertise 
recovery of bad sectors.  Does anyone know about these?  I'm not about 
to drop $50 for software that /might/ fix my drive when I can go buy a 
replacement drive for $50.  So my last question(s):  any recommendations 
for a replacement drive?  Are Maxtor drives considered "low end"?  I'm 
stuck with PATA since my motherboard does not have SATA.  I bought it 
just before that technology became standard.

Thanks,
Jonathan