I just wanted to make sure that a hard drive for someone whom I am trying to replace is actually bad, and that it's not just the sata wires or something.

It all started with a blue screen during boot, on an older dell desktop. It was the "unmountable boot volume" blue screen of death message, on a SYSTEM with windows xp.

I was able to boot from a CD and and ran a chkdsk operation, there were many 'unreadable' or 'bad' sectors(don't remember the error message exactly, but something along those LINES). also, when i BOOTED into mini windows xp(from the cd), the "c:" drive had disappeared from windows explorer after a bit, and the computer was running EXTREMELY slow.

so now, how can i be sure that it's the hard drive(which, by the way, is a western digital caviar se serial ata - 160gb(model: wd1600jd - 75hbb0) and not the sata wires or anything? problem is, i took out the hard drive from the persons computer, but at home, none of my PCs are sata, they're all ultra-ata.

thanks in advance Quote

... chkdsk operation, there were many 'unreadable' or 'bad' sectors...

You already found the answer.
You may send the bad drive it to CH -
and it will get a proper burial.

... how would i know(short of asking the retailer) if a certain SATA 3.0 hard drive will have a jumper setting that will allow it to operate on SATA 1.5? looking on newegg, none of the info mentions if any of the SATA 3.0 drives are 1.5 compatible.

All 3.0's are backward compatible to 1.5. Depending on the motherboard SATA controller, the new drive may not have to be jumpered to 1.5.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA
"...According to the hard drive manufacturer Maxtor, motherboard host controllers using the VIA and SIS chipsets VT8237, VT8237R, VT6420, VT6421L, SIS760, SIS964 found on the ECS 755-A2 manufactured in 2003, do not support SATA 3 Gbit/s drives...
To address interoperability problems many manufacturers allow to switch drives to the SATA1 mode. The largest hard drive manufacturer, Seagate/Maxtor, has added a user-accessible jumper-switch known as the Force 150, to switch between 1.5 Gbit/s and 3 Gbit/s operation. Western Digital uses a jumper setting called OPT1 Enabled to force 1.5 Gbit/s data transfer speed (OPT1 is used by putting the jumper on pins 5 & 6). Samsung drives can be switched to 1.5 Gbit/s mode by using software downloadable from the manufacturer website. This needs a SATA2 controller to use temporarily while programming the drive..."