How to fix HDD with error?

[darkflames]

In my dad's computer his computer will randomly shut down after being on for a few hours and then as it is going through the Windows XP boot process it will say something about please insert boot drive or something like that and when you turn off the computer and turn it back on it says the same thing and when you put in the windows xp disc in, it says there are no hard drives detected. The way i temporarily fixed it was to unplug it from the ide cable and replug it back in and it worked for a little while then would restart and say the same thing. So i plugged the hard drive into my computer using a different ide cable and using the hard drive as a secondary drive. I scan the hard drive using the windows built in disk check, I check the "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" and as it scans about 15 seconds into it, it says 1 large file records processed. Then it closes out of the program. Does anyone know of what i can do to maybe fixed the sector or something I can do to fix the drive? Its a Maxtor IDE disk drive.

 

[Syntax Error]

When hard drives start to have bad sectors and errors like you're describing, it usually means that it's on its way out. There's no real way to "fix" bad sectors, so I would back up all the data you can before the hard drive deteriorates to the point where it's completely inaccessable. The Maxtor drive is unreliable at this point and I wouldn't trust it with any important data at this point.

 

[darkflames]

It already failed once and corrupted windows and i had to back the data up some other way i just reinstalled windows on it last weekend so there really isnt anything to back up now on it