I have two almost new 160Gb HDDs which have been loaded once with Windows XP home Edition (genuine).
In service, each has become corrupted and I have tried to repair them by booting from the XP disc and selecting 'repair' option. The system then loads the required files, starts the repair then freezes and will not respond to inputs. I have to switch off the PC.
I have tried selecting the 'Install XP' option which leads to a screen which offers 'repair' or 'install' but regardless of what is selected nothing works; after some initial activity it freezes.
The current HDD that I am using was previously corrupted and I managed to format the drive and then re-install XP but I suspect that some of the disc is 'bad' since it is again causing problems.
Should I now consider moving up to Vista because the real ballsache of 'loading' a new HDD from scratch is updating XP with SP3. I have not copied my current drive to an 'image' because if there is a problem it will copy that too.
So, my question is; what step by step actions should I take to be able to reformat and recover the corrupted HDDs bearing in mind that I have my valuable data backed-up to an external drive?
