Thanks for your advice, much appreciated. I have had several attempts at wiping, copying and generally re-formatting the faulty drive. All to no avail. I hate giving up but it all comes back to the fact that there are probably damaged sectors on the disk. The drive is out of guarantee even though it has been used very little, so can't return it for exchange.
As a last resort I have downloaded a program named Flobo from the Samsung site which promises to repair faulty HDDs such as mine. I tried this on my desk PC but that is Win7 64 but Flobo was written for Win XP I think. My problem now is to find a boot program which will enable me to run Flobo from CD or flash drive in the laptop. There is BartPE but that is XP vintage. Can UBCD be used to run a program from CD or USB?
As a last resort I have downloaded a program named Flobo from the Samsung site which promises to repair faulty HDDs such as mine. I tried this on my desk PC but that is Win7 64 but Flobo was written for Win XP I think. My problem now is to find a boot program which will enable me to run Flobo from CD or flash drive in the laptop. There is BartPE but that is XP vintage. Can UBCD be used to run a program from CD or USB?