Dead HD or no?

Greetings all-

I have here a Gateway 400c. Just over a year old. The hard drive is acting strangely.

Windows will not boot, it just sits on the clouds screen and the hd light stays on. The hard drive continually makes a noise like its spooling up.

So I started the pc, exited in DOS mode, and ran scandisk. It said it would take 55 hours to run a surface scan.

So I exited put, and just did a dir, the PC is stuck trying to calculate free space.

Is this hd dead? Is there a way to check this thing to know for sure?

Al

Do you know who the manufacturer of the HDD is? I ask this because usually now a days, HDD manufacturers will have a diagnostic disk you can use that is usually very telling. I use Quantum drives (sad they quit the hdd business) and they provided a couple diagnostic disks that have proven valuable to me. It may also be that the partition or file system is messed up which would be solved by low-level formating the drive. I don't blame you for being concerned though. Somethings going on there.

Really looks like Your HDD is dying...
Like it was suggested, download and use test utility from manufacturer's site.
Your PC one year old? - well, then HDD should be covered by warrantee. RMA it.

Either the HDD is dying or the partition table is hosed. My guess is the first one. Do like Atlas said and download that particular mfg diag disk. It will tell you if there is a problem. Usually most HDD mfg have a 3 year warranty on their drives, so if it is bad you can RMA it with them. Western Digital and Seagate have an online RMA process. Gateway usually uses Western Digital and Seagate. You might even get lucky, sometimes a mfg will be out of the size drive you have and ship you a larger one.

Good Luck!