SATA hard drive help Please

[Mista Panda]

i have a toshiba satellite and its got a SATA hard drive and it crashed so i bought a new copy of windows vista home primum since my disc got stolen and i get this error after the first few start up saying registry error either courupt missing or unwrita ble please help i hate myold computer it runs windows 98 lol ive tried reformating the hard drive and every thing but i still get it and it wont load the welcome screan it wont get that far

 

[ronpaul]

*blinks* are you saying the hard drive crashed? If the drive is dead or defective that could explain the write errors, and reinstalling windows won't solve a hardware problem, you'd have to replace the drive. If you've wiped (reformatted) the hard drive and tried installing a fresh copy of Windows and you're getting registry corruptions and write errors it's either the drive or the machine. Have you tried booting into safe mode or can you not get that far?

 

[PD187]

Some things you could try (in no particular order):

1) DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke)
While this might be a bit extreme, I've had to do it before so that I could reinstall XP on my desktop. It will guarantee that there's no remnants of any old installs laying around on the hard drive. Make sure to get the beta version as it's *MUCH* faster on SATA hard drives than the old version. (Old one takes 1 day for a 250GB hdd whereas the beta takes about 2-3 hours). For the 2.0 beta, you have to build it yourself. I can't remember offhand how to build it. I'm sure there's a readme included in the download though. (editv2)Look for the "DBAN for recent Intel and AMD computers" on the DBAN website. It includes an ISO for you to burn to CD-R/W (/editv2)

2)Your hard drive manufacturer's boot cd/hard disk tools.
The reasoning behind this is obvious since it'll check the disk for errors.
Since no brand was specified, here's a bunch of links.
Hitachi
Seagate (The DOS one should do the trick)
Maxtor (when you install it, you'll be able to install a bootable media builder).
Western Digital
(edit)
If you have a Maxtor/Seagate drive, the utilities *should* be interchangeable since Seagate bought up Maxtor anyways.
(/edit)
That's about all I got to suggest about that.

 

[Carmen Miranda]

Run a program called HD TUNE on your hard drive and search for bad sectors.

Also, run the read and write test. There should be no spikes in the line that runs from top left to bottom right, and the yellow dots that run from the bottom left to top right should be a big cloud that follows a roughly steady shape in that direction.
I realize this all sounds ambiguous, at best. It will make sense when you run the program.

Still stuck? Let us know!