Format / Hard Drive

[Malandro]

My old hard drive was somehow corrupted. I tried reformatting it etc but to no avail. i then dcided to buy a new hard drive. It arrived, I earthed myself, I tried to format it and install windows (i have all the disks etc). I was then told that the new hard drive was corrupt and so I couldn't finish formatting. There is a chance the brand new hard drie could have a fault on it, but is there an other part of my PC that could be faulty or am I doing something else wrong? Please help?

[j2buttonsw]

You would be very unlucky to buy a new broken hard drive but these things can happen. I have seen bad memory that bring up these type of errors, though.

[Malandro]

So perhaps I need some new Ram? Is that what you mean? I don't suppose you know of any way of testing memory?

[BadBob]

I think your first course of action would be to return the hard drive and try again. Then if its the same problem then start to look at memory etc. Not sure how much memory you have but its normally in pairs or made up of more than one module, so you could try takling one of the modules out and then trying again, if that didnt work try with another module and so on. A friend had a probelm on his PC and this method of removing memory, effectively testing each module on its own, found the problem memory quickly.

[j2buttonsw]

You could try downloading this: http://hcidesign.com/memtest/ I haven't tried it but have read that it is good.