Hello José, There is a program that could help you if the hard drive's master boot sector is still intact. It can recover most of the data on the failing drive if it is still bootable. It is called SpinRite 5. You can find it at: http://grc.com/spinrite.htm Go to the bottom of the page, to the SpinRite Overview link. It will explain the capabilities of SpinRite. The program is kind of expensive, but I think well worth it. It can be used on all hard drives as a preventive maintenance and early warning of failure. Check it out. Hope this helps. Jim Dodd ----- Original Message ----- From: José Rui To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2001 5:38 PM Subject: [PCBUILD] Hi! I would like some help with this, if possible: I did the download of the Return of Wolfenstein multiplayer Demo and after the instalation and the choose of a server to play, my hard disk began to make some loud noises, something like if it was trying to write but with no luck and this in repetitive cycles! The only way I could stop it was to do a restart. In the scandisk, when it tries to do a surface test( only in the surface test!) it stops somewhere in the midlle and begin to make the same noise in repetitive cycles! No need to say that I can only get out of there by doing a restart and ignoring the scandisk! I can´t see any bad sectors, since it does not have time to mark them! What happened to my hard disk? Is it damaged? Is there any way a game could do this to a piece of hardware? How can I mark this sectors (in the case of the HD got damaged), so the computer no more writes there? Thank you very much! José Rui. The NOSPIN Group Promotions is now offering Mandrake Linux or Red Hat Linux CD sets along with our NOSPIN Power Linux CD... at a great price!!! http://freepctech.com/goodies/promotions.shtml The NOSPIN Group provides a monthly newsletter with great tips, information and ideas: NOSPIN-L, The NOSPIN Magazine Visit our web site to signup: http://freepctech.com