my sister's laptop,having an os of windows 98 only,,, pentium ii.i recomend her to upgrade to windows 98 se,for her to have compatiblities of softwares such as limewires,,,but the problem is,,her hard drive is damaged,,yeah,it has bad sectors on it,,formatting it would be a big risk,,why?because i formatted my pc and it has bad sectors,,it wasnt able to finish formatting making my hard drive just a piece of crap.. what would i do to change her os without the aid of formatting,ive tried to update,but still cant..laptop's hard drives are costly....
2007-03-12 04:38:17 · 9 answers · asked by Anonymous in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Laptops & Notebooks
If the drive has enough bad sectors that it cannot be formatted, the drive needs to be replaced. You're just creating more problems for yourself down the road by not formatting.
2007-03-12 04:45:46 · answer #1 · answered by whodeyflya 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋
I don't know that much about hard drives, but whenever I had "bad sector" reports on my windows pc's the hard drive always failed pretty soon after that, anyhow. Sorry, but I think it will crash eventually anyhow. You probably tried this already, but have you tried a disk "repair" software program? Norton used to have one that was really good at repairing things that other programs couldn't fix. Also, do you have USB 2.0 or firewire on the laptop? If so, an external drive might be fast enough, and not that expensive, though you might not be able to set the bios to boot from it. Good luck--hopefully someone else can give you some advice that will help more than this.
2007-03-12 04:47:13 · answer #2 · answered by ROBERTSJOHNSON 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Once a laptop hard drive gets bad sectors, it is only a matter of time before it is completely corrupt. I have seen some very reasonable prices on 2 1/2" hard drives. I'd advise going the extra mile and getting a new hard drive.
2007-03-12 04:43:24 · answer #3 · answered by Kokopelli 6 · 3⤊ 0⤋
I'm sorry but you are screwed. You are just going to have to try formatting.
What you both really need to do is save up some money for awhile so that you can buy new machines. From the sound of it, your computers are dying and won't last more than maybe a year (if your lucky).
2007-03-12 04:43:46 · answer #4 · answered by Chip 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
1. do a back up of all important information.
- can just email them out or copy to cd burner/network drive.
2. use scandisk to mark the bad sectors
3. reinstall win98se. not upgrade.
4. best to reformat then reinstall.
5. data is always more costly than the hdd
6. anotherway is to avoid using the hdd.
download ubuntu/knoppix livecd and boot from the cd drive.
you will have to store information on usb drive though.
2007-03-12 04:48:33 · answer #5 · answered by David Lee 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Well as far as using the update for 98, you cant do that. Microsoft has stopped support for windows 98. It would be better of upgrading to xp.
2007-03-12 04:44:14 · answer #6 · answered by nunya b 2 · 0⤊ 1⤋
Use scan disk to fix your bad sectors.
2007-03-12 04:46:02 · answer #7 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
u guys too cheap to buy new laptop
2007-03-12 04:53:38 · answer #8 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
I hate c does that count.
2007-03-12 04:49:04 · answer #9 · answered by ihate c 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋