What is zeroing a hard drive?

Question

I have a 60 GB Western Digital Scorpio in my Dell Latitude C600. After a reformat and losing 20% of the data for my music website, now I'm getting BSODs off the charts and random reboots, programs exiting by itself constantly. Usually it's because of something with the ntfs.sys, pci.sys thing.


The diagnostic utility for WD drives always detects errors and bad sectors in the complete scan and chkdsk reveals more...now I may have to use the WD utility to zero my hard drive...but what exactly is zeroing a hard drive and will I be able to clean install Windows XP after writing zeros to the drive because now its getting ridiculous.

Answer 1

Zeroing your hard-drive is basically a low level formatting or wiping your drive of all data including partition information. You will lose all data when you do this. Honestly you need to backup your data and buy a new drive. ATA drives are less forgiving on bad sectors. Ultimately what will happen is that windows will write a file on a bad sector that it needs to boot, then it will reboot over and over and over and over again. New hard drives are $50 at Compusa.

Answer 2

cubsfan,
Zero the hard drive, this will wipe it completely clean, from the BSOD that you are getting, the OS is missing important files, ( I will keep this in plain english, instead of tecnician talk).
FDisk= It wipes the drive, but data can still be recovered.
Zero= No Data remains on drive, it is completely wiped clean.
Also, the zero, debugs the drive, this should allow a clean install, if you get the same problem, Same Files Missing, then the CD could be scratched or pitted enough, that it is skipping these files on installation part of the install. This won't hurt anything to try, then if no good, spend the money for a hard drive.
Hard Drive= $$$$$
Zero, and Reinstall= Maybe a Headache, and about an hour of your time. Good Luck Friend

Answer 3

There are several issues here.

First, your problem with ntfs.sys, pci.sys probably will not be solved by the reformat and re-installation. In fact, it may be worsened if you switched your format from FAT32 to NFTS. Your problem appears to be caused by bad memory sticks or pci expansion cards. See below.

http://www.ntcompatible.com/postprint114918.html
http://www.theeldergeek.com/pci%20and%20ntfs%20dot%20sys%20errors.htm
http://www.theeldergeek.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=5693

Incidentally, the expression of "zeroing a hard drive" comes from the binary digits of 0 and 1. Making every bite (data) into 0 instead of 1 is associated with the complete erasure of data. It's just a figure of speech, meaning that reformatting does not really replace all bites with zeros.

Answer 4

Zeroing a hard drive means setting ALL BIT OF hard to Zero
this is a software operation and don't damage your hard disk
and also ingore that bad sectors.
for example if 10% of your hard disk has bad sector, after Zeroing you have 90% of your hard disk space!

Answer 5

low level format with WD software