"Martin Hotze" wrote in message
...
most likely you have a bad sector (physically) on your hard drive, bad
enough within the boot sector. Most likely your harddrive is short before
dead. Download test tools from your harddrive manufactor and check your
harddrive

Constant seeking like that described suggests a problem with the servo
platter (which the drive uses as a reference for head position). If the
reference is bad, there's no way any utility software can recover from that.
Furthermore, having the drive powered on trying to fix it just increases the
chances that the drive will get further damaged (especially if the problem
with the servo platter is that a head crashed...there's probably debris
floating around in the drive at that point, which could lead to further head
crashes, as well as cause the servo platter to be damaged even more).

If the data is backed up, and there is 100% no chance of taking the drive to
a recovery service, then there's no harm in messing around with utility
software. And there's a remote chance it might help. But otherwise, the
best course of action is to leave the drive powered down.

Pete