Computer Gurus: HELP, PLEASE!

[Gryffindor_Bookworm]

My niece just called -- she's using her dad's computer (a Dell, I think) and it was behaving badly, so she ran Norton. It says she has "bad blocks."

WTF does that mean? :shrug:

[Guy Fawkes]

1. Ok, heres's what you do...

1.Go to my computer.
2.Right click on the icon of your hard drive.
3.Go to "properties"
4.Go to the "Tools" tab.
5.Click "check Now"
6.Check both boxes and hit "start"
--> It may ask you to restart, do so. It will perform the check before you log in.

[stldemocrat]

2. Dell..

gives money to repukes. Tell her to buy a Mac.

[Guy Fawkes]

3. Mac sucks. Build your own computer.

[Gryffindor_Bookworm]

4. I'm going to give her a Mac. I have an extra one.

:hi:

[necso]

5. Sounds like a hard drive going bad.

Immediately get anything valuable off the computer, by burning verified CDR's or over a net, or onto a second hard drive.

Worst case, put the failing hard drive on another computer and do it this way (OS compatablity issues, so be careful).

The drive may be salvageable by low level formating (you could also try OS level formating, but it is not as reliable), which a utility from the manufacturer should be able to do. Usually I just buy a new drive and put the "repaired" drive on the shelf for temporary use here or there.

The drive may be able to be returned for a replacement. But a lot of warranties are now one year, instead of three.

And like the other guy said, running the windows hard drive test (when booted into safe mode) to check the results of the first test, wouldn't hurt.

I would get anything valuable off first though, because if you let windows "repair" a bad hard drive, you can end up with nothing. And any filesystem "repair" could turn the drive into garbage.