Q I recently purchased a 1.7GB Seagate hard drive from a swap meet in Geelong and most times I try to use it, it works fine. But after you restart the computer everything becomes corrupt. When Scandisk is run it finds an error with the boot record (or something!) and fixes it. This creates lost fragments the next time you run Scandisk. What's wrong with it and how do I get it fixed?

A With a lot of niggling little errors, like the one you are experiencing, there is often no obvious answer. However, here are some possibilities to consider:

1. The hard drive could be physically faulty and either needs to be repaired or replaced. This is why it is useful to buy any computer equipment from someone you trust who will provide quality after-sales service.

2. There is an error in the drive's low level formatting. This is very uncommon but has been known to happen. While it is possible to do a low-level reformat yourself on most drives, doing so is not advised. Drive manufacturers do an optimal low-level format in the factory. If you do your own low-level reformat you are likely to lose a lot of performance from the drive. Once again, this is one of those things you need a good level of after sales service to solve.

If you are not going to get after-sales service you could get the drive serviced by a third party. However, this will probably cost as much as the drive did and is not guaranteed to produce results.

3. There could be an error in the partition table. You will need to run fdisk.exe to repartition the drive. You will find a copy of this DOS utility on your Windows 95 CD or disks. If the problem drive is your boot drive you should create a boot disk containing fdisk.exe and format.exe. Repartitioning will wipe out all the data on the drive.

4. There could simply be an error in the driveÆs format. Reformatting the drive should fix this. As this wipes all the data on the drive you might as well run fdisk.exe and repartition the drive, killing two birds with one stone.

5. If weird things are happening to a hard driveÆs boot record one likely possibility is a virus. Obtain a high-quality antivirus program and make sure you have the latest signature file update. Boot your computer and run your virus scanner from a "clean" diskette.

6. One other source of problems is that most drives can be set to one of three modes. These are Normal, LBA and Large. Normally when you install the drive the IDE autodetect function in the system BIOS works out all the appropriate settings. Sometimes it will get the mode wrong. Even though the drive appears to work sometimes, you may get the sort of error you have experienced. You need to manually set the correct mode for the drive in the system BIOS. It will most likely be LBA. But if that fails try Large or Normal.