Is my hard drive fixable?

[Slooow_Jo]

After endless problems with my pc, I thought my hard drive was to blame. Turns out it wasn't as that is what is in my pc now. I bought a new hard drive a 160mb PATA IDE. I created a partition & formatted etc but while I was trying to install windows xp the pc kept freezing at various points. So I would have to reboot, each time I deleted the partition & started again, eventually it failed, when I tried to reboot I got a red box with the message 'disk reading error' so is it fixable or should I start digging a hole in the garden?

Also although my pc is finally up & running again & I've upgraded from 1x512mb to 2x512mb it still isn't running quite right ie if I watch a video on youtube it pauses & the 'loading circle' appears. I have ran memtest & that showed no errors so it isn't my ram. Any ideas?

[ACtheTROLL]

you don't say how old your machine is .... but 512, pata ... i suppose it's not new ....
some older machines don't like the c/sel option and prefer the good old fixed master / slave configuration.

if you've already done that ... the new disc should have a guarantee ... and the expirt date will either be printed on the lable ... or visit the mfrs website and enter the serial no to start a returns process

what you describe sounds like it's your download speed
if your machine is a bit of a clunker .... pause the video ... give it a minute .... and then start it up ... hopefully you'll get to the end without more delays

[Slooow_Jo]

I bought the pc second hand about 2 years ago it is a custom built machine.

Pc has totally died again :( so on a friends atm.

I tried the HD again & it seems to be working. I deleted & recreated the partition but when OS installation got to copying files it took from 2pm yesterday till 8.30am this morning. I've just left it running now. But when I tried before it would always hang at 34 minutes which I found the solution was to find the last 'inf' file in the setupapi.log, mine being netsis.inf & delete it, which cured the 34 min hang but pc still wasn't running right. I've now removed my sound & video cards but still having problems. Anyone have any ideas what could be wrong?