hard disk problem. Bad sector?

[fastandfurryous]

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Hi all.

Interesting little problem this one...

I have had a Dell laptop running XP until recently. Now that it is out of warranty, not only can I start to play with it, but it appears to have a faulty hard disk. It failed to load XP one day, so having tried the xp recovery console (what a waste of time!) It was time for slackware. I still need a dual boot, so after much partitioning, xp was to have 8gb of the 20 available, and slack was to have the remaining 12. After many many attempted installs, and various different partitioning options it would appear that there is a major fault on the hard disk, about 1.7gb in from the start, but only FAT or NTFS have a problem with it. When formatting with FAT or NTFS, the format stalls at about cylinder 200 (1.7ish GB in) and the only way to stop it is to power down. ext3 or reiserFS have no problems formatting that part of the drive.
The obvious answer would be to put linux on the first 12gb and xp on the last 8. Unfortunately not, as to do an install, xp must have control of the start of the drive, in order to write the MBR. arse!

I know the hard disk is probably rodgered, but does anyone have any ideas, or know of a decent hard disk analysis tool that might be able to mark this section of the disk as bad? I cannot run windoze scandisk on it, as the drive has to be formatted to do that, and I am not yet knowledgeable enough with linux to know what it can do. (knowing my luck, there's exactly what I want already installed on one of my other slackware machines)

I do have a desktop IDE to 2.5" IDE cable adaptor, so the drive can be pulled out of the laptop and installed in a working computer for analysis... Does that help?

Any help or suggestions would be most appreciated.

David.

[drakebasher]

I cannot run windoze scandisk on it, as the drive has to be formatted to do that, and I am not yet knowledgeable enough with linux to know what it can do.

Maybe you can do a DOS format from Linux and then run scandisk? To start fresh, Microsoft has a debug routine you can use to wipe out the MBR. Then with Linux, you can run mkfs to make a filesystem. Read the man pages for mkfs and mkfs.msdos. Maybe then you will be able to run scandisk.[/url]