bad sector

[DEATHNARG]

hi all what i want to no is my hard drive says it has a bad sector can it be formated or does this mean its fuked when i boot up my comp it gets to bios screen and then says somthing like set tv dumpf lags=8 one or more disk drives has a bad sector hit enter to analyze with scandisk and when you hit enter it goes to a blue screen with scan disk written at top left corner and thats all, it just stays like it and does nothing til you turn it off

[Will.Spencer]

Every hard drive has some bad sectors. That's just the reality of magnetic media. That's no so bad.

ScanDisk locking up -- that could be bad. How long have you let it run before turning the computer off?

Can you boot up the computer at all without running ScanDisk? Can you boot from another drive? Can you put that hard drive in another computer and run ScanDisk on it from there?

[DEATHNARG]

ok firstly i left scandisk running for about 3/4 of an hour
second yeah sort of it goes to scandisk sometimes,and other times it doesnt sometimes after it does the memory test it just comes up saying hardrive failure press f1 to continue when i press f1 it comes up saying boot from atapi cd-rom: failure disk boot failure insert system disk and press return and then other times i turn it on it comes up saying that tvdumpf thing i looked on net and it says that tvdumpf is somthing to do with zonealarm but i cant get in to my comp to uninstall it alls i want is to be able to start it in safe mode and ill be write
third no i cant comes up saying :boot from atapi cd-rom: failure disk boot failure insert system disk and press return does this mean (98 boot disk)
fourth what a great idea im gonna go try ill let u no how i go tomorrow cause dont have the net on at home i have to go to library why pay when i can get for free dont no what id do without ya Will , great forum too , thanks for all your help talk soon

[DEATHNARG]

well i managed to put it in another computer (xp though does it matter)but same thing happens scandisc locks up so i put it back in the origanal comp and got to where the start in safe mode start in safe mode with command prompt ect list is and tryd to start in safe mode but came up saying insert system disk failure and so on so i trd safe mode command prompt and worked so i typed dir/p to see whats on it and theres no win98 file there at all so im not sure if i should go 98/setup or imean is there somthing else i could try do i have to put 98 back on it.

ive got an old ****y 3gig hard drive and ihooked this up but got nowhere cause i dont really have a clue lol how do i set it up so ican format it and start again from scratch so i can use that insted of origanal

[Will.Spencer]

ScanDisk is the tool to mark bad sectors as bad and remove them from use.

If ScanDisk can't work on the drive, it's probably a paperweight now.

If you have data on that drive that you absolutely must recover, there are tools that can attempt to get the data off of the drive.

The drive itself, however, should be considered dead.