I have a laptop thats abuot 3 years old it used to run windows XP.

the other day while copying some files over the LAN onto the laptop i got the blue screen of death, had to reboot yadah. when it booted up i got a invalid boot.ini error. yadah yadah it turned out every file on the disk was corrupt. i tried to do some things to "recover" the data. nothing worked so i decided to format and install XP on it again.

i put in the windows xp cd and begna to boot up, while doing the pre install steps and checks it said it would not install because there were errors on the hard drive. so i thought maybe i need to replace the hard drive maybe it went bad.

i tried to run some self booting tools to see if i could verify the issue. i got mixed results, either the tool would crash while running or report no problems.

so i had another idea. I should install linux on it (CentOS) and see what happens.

well it worked! i even used it some it seems to work fine. I don't know if linux detected bad sectors on the disk, or isn't aware of them or what. but I'd like to run some sort of detailed hard drive anayalsis tool that will be able to detect any problems on the hard drive. could someone recomended me some/a few?

(i tried some of the commands that come with it to do disk checks but I have not been able to do it succesfully, most likely because I couldn't figure out the right arguments to send.

Thanks,
danny

If you boot from a liveCD like knoppix, you could run the badblocks program on each of the hard disk partitions. This will do a surface scan of the media and report any bad blocks it finds.

That or you could try one of the commercial products like spinrite.

i have linux installed, i just need something to test the hard drive with.

i tried knoppix i cant seem to find a hard drive test utility

use badblocks and fsck

man badblocks
man fsck

use QTparted to edit your partitions.
you can remove all your partitions and recreate them

ive tried using both but i cant figure them out even with al the examples on google, is there a graphical interface for badblocks or anything?

What did you try, and did you get some error message or something?

i alwyas get "bad block size" even though i know its the correct one (found the blocksize by using the fdisk -lu /dev/hda command)

can you copy-paste the command and output, then the output of dmesg?