Is my hard drive failing

No, the old drive never failed, and this one has been fine from November until now.  I chose the maximum size suggested as compatible for the new drive.

The drive is probably OK.  If the old drive had failed, the error may still be there from it.

The bigger problem is that you installed a 160G drive into a system that won't take a drive that large - that may be the cause of the problem.

 

The BIOS likely reports the drive as 137G.  Running a BIOS-level utility on the drive is dangerous as a result.

 

You might want to try running Data Lifeguard (www.wdc.com) just to be sure, however.

 

Okay I started this thread out of town, and now I'm home, so I can do a bit more (from an internet cafe...)

I got home and went to restore my drive for the 3rd or 4h time, but this time I couldn't reboot after.  Same black screen after the Dell splash screen with useless blinking cursor.  In one of my previous restorations (Norton GHost 9.0) I did get an error (Error EA3905FE cluster not allocated) but was able to restore with the base image made earlier that day.  I think this is unrelated and was a problem with that particular incremental back up - I had problems ejecting the drive after making it.

 

I can boot using the Windows CD and ran chkdsk C: /p /r with the following result:

chkdsk found and fixed one or more errors on the volume.

But still same problem upon reboot (ie - I can't!)

MBRFIX - same deal.

 

I tried the Western Digital utility and I could not even boot from the CD according to their instructions.  (I used their file: Diag504cCD.iso for my model WD1600BEVE-00UYT0 drive according to the website.

 

I ran the little (outdated no doubt) disk doctor utility that is included with my Norton Ghost 9.0 which seemed like a simple (quick!) test.

Results:

Partition Table - check

File Structures - check

Indexes - check

Security Descriptors - check

File Data - skipped

Free Space - skipped

Don't know why it skipped the last two tests and the tab to select which tests to run/skip is not available in XP. 

 

Now I'm trying to restore the drive again hoping that the chkdsk will allow me to restore.  If I can do that, I'll try the Western Digital via a different route.

If that doesn't work, I'll try restoring with an earlier back up image.  If THAT doesn't work, maybe I should reinstall windows with my old CD and see what happens with that.  (XP SP1!)

Final thing - I looked up my original error code (before the one in my original post that said error code 1000-0146 "Log Contains Previous Error(s)"  and found that the first error code after the first occurance of the problem was this:

DST Short Test Fail

Error code 1000-0142

Unit 4: Drive Selt Test failed Status byte = 79

 

There HAVE been a number of XP updates that have come down the pipeline over this week.  Something for office, SP 3 and some java update.  Maybe there's an issue here?  I'm sure, however, the initial occurance was before the SP 3 update, though.

I did install the WinOff program and was initially suspicious of it, but I've since deleted it and am still having the problem.  http://www.ampsoft.net/utilities/WinOFF.php

 

I use (and keep updated) the McAfee virus software.  (Anti virus, I should say.) 

 

Any more thoughts?

Thanks!