Does anyone know of a free program or procedure that will determine if a hard disk is good, and if it is, allow formatting it? Heres the reason I need the program. Windows Vista failed to boot (either in normal or safe mode); I inserted Installation disk and selected "Repair computer"; result was failure to repair with reason given in log as "System volume on disk is corrupt". Since it now appeared that a fresh install of Vista was the only solution, I tried this (without inserting product key as my copy is the upgrade version); it got as far as "Copying files...0%", stayed there for a couple minutes and then exited saying that installation had failed...with no further explanation. I then went to Advanced Options..the only one that worked was Command Prompt which opened a DOS window. Switched to C:\; ran a DIR which showed all Windows files (and all others) were there. I ran CHKDSK which ran OK showing some file problems. Then ran it again with the /f option..it ran OK fixing file problems up to USN journal completion. The next line read "The second NTFS boot sector is unwriteable" and CHKDSK exited. It seemed that the disk must be bad, so I decided to format it and do a fresh install. The format process ran OK up to 99% where it froze. Now I cannot even get back to the Command Prompt from the Vista disk. Realizing that I probably did some stupid things (tho they seemed logical at the time!), I would appreciate tech experts to tell me what went wrong....and where I screwed up! 1 person needs an answerI do too

Your HD maker will have a free downloadable bootable cd/floppy with which you can test the drive, depending on the state of the drive it maybe able to repair it, but any such repair should be viewed as a temp measure, and if the utility shows faults the drive should be replaced. eg SeaTools from Seagate is one such utility, http://www.grc.com/default.htm is a generic drive utility

Thanks for your help. I know that the disk is probably history (no big problem since all my files were backed up to an external HD), but I would be interested to know why the Vista "Repair my Computer" failed to repair the system. Also: Why did System Restore fail to find any restore points when I know they did exist? And why did Visrta refuse to do a clean install? And how was I able to boot into DOS if the disk was bad?

If the HD has failed, or the file system / record is corrupted win or any utility maybe unable to repair it. Nor can you undertake a sys restore in these circumstances. As for boot into DOS, that depends what exactly you mean as there is no DOS in Vista