Hard Drive Bad Clusters

Got the task of seeing if I could get my daughters friends laptop working again. It is and HP Omnibook 900 Pentium 3, Windows 98 SE and about a 4-5 Gig hard drive. Can get it to load in safe mode but explorer would lock up a lot and then error. Managed to do some housekeeping (Disk clean-up and remove some junk programs. But scandisk ran into problems and led me to doing a surface scan and "fix problems". Out of the 1,258,726 clusters it has examined 1,684 and found 12 bad. First off it will not keep running its check straght threw till the end. Every few min. it's back to the "Problem Found" fix it, don't fix it,exit screen and I have to hit enter to get it to continue. I'm sure even if this does get things working a new hard drive is in order. Just not sure I'm up to the task of installing and moving things to the new one. Any input you have would be great. David

 

Definitely sounds like the HD is on its way out. So backup what you can as a first resort. Changing a HD in a laptop is generally fairly straight forward - just remove a couple of screws, slide out the old HD and put in the new drive (you may need to take off an adapter from the old HD but that's only another couple of screws to undo, and then place it on the new drive). You could try to slave the old HDinto another PC (a desktop is by far the easiest) copy the data over then copy the data back onto the new HD by the same method.