Well, I left it to do the disk check overnight, but during that time it crashed. Oh, the joy.

I managed to get the system back up and running (Firefox is installed on the C drive and is working OK, which is why you’re seeing this), but the integrity of the D drive is non-existant. Occasionally, I get the message that D is not formatted.

Formatting is going to be my next step. Hopefully this may help with it. I have a feeling it won’t.

Aaaaaaaaaand, it won’t format. This drive is goosed, by the looks of it. I’m going to reboot into safe mode and try from there…

UPDATE:

Well, the computer won’t even START in safe mode. I’m guessing that’s down to the bad drive in some way. I also swapped over the SATA cables, just for dafties, to make sure there wasn’t an issue there.

UPDATE 2 @ 7:30 AM:

It still doesn’t want to work. At all. Still not formatting. This means, however, that I came up with a plan so fiendishly clever that Columbo himself wouldn’t have thought of it. And, it involves my old friend Linux. I actually came up with this idea a few hours ago, but ran into problems executing it.

Despite the fact that I’ve been pricking about with Linux for years now, when it came to finding a bootable disk, I had nothing but problems. My DVD writer truly sucks, as it doesn’t read CDs correctly, and all of my Linux ISOs on DVD appear to have vanished, they’re nowhere to be seen. Therefore, I’m having to download a new one. All 4.4Gb of it.

Thankfully, for the first time ever, my internet connection is behaving itself, and I appear to actually have full speed!!!

More coming soon when this ISO finishes.

UPDATE 3 @ 8:43 AM

It’s goosed.

UPDATE 4 @ 6:17 PM

I’ve done a lot, and actually typed a lot about this, but woefully, it seems to have been lost in the ether somewhere. Anyway, tocut a long story short, I downloaded the ISO, didn’t work. It hung up when trying to detect the hard disk.

I booted back into windows, using the WD Recovery tool thing, managed to get the drive to format, to a point. Still couldn’t do anything with it. I ran HD tune on it, and got this…

Yes, more bad sectors than you could shake an infected stick at. I had one last idea. Boot ‘n’ Nuke. The handy little utility that wipes every last bit of information from a drive so you can start from scratch. Could this do anything?

Well, it would take 7 hours approximately, so I went to bed. I awoke to find the drive successfully wiped! Hurrah.

I inserted the Ubuntu disk, and whaddya know? It detected the drive. I aborted the installation, and went back into Windows, and it doesn’t see the drive. At all. Not in Device manager, not in Computer Management, nowehere. Buggery.

Currently, I’m back in Ubuntu, allowing the whole thing to install, though I doubt I’ll get to see it all set up as I’m off to work in a few minutes

Oh, and I’ve fixed the broken image. Ta Glen.

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