I/O device errors when unzipping

[mexicangangsta]

Hello guys i was having this problem for 2 weeks now and i've been googling different errors and i think i came up with whats ailing my laptop, I just wanna have a 2nd opinion.

Okay so basically i have a toshiba satellite a305 with factory hardware. Now it had vista before and it stopped working. It just froze one time and decided to not respond to any input (mouse/keyboard, nothing). I tried restarting many times but it did not work. Since i didnt have anything i would of regret to do without i reformatted the drive and did a clean install of windows xp.

To make long story short i reformatted like 3 times now installed a OS and it works fine like brand new until i install 10GB or more onto the C: drive. Then i try unzipping 1 program only to get break errors due to I/O device error.

I been reading about I/O device errors and so far i've got that its basically an error that the computer cant read the data of the drive. Oh i should mention i did a memtest to test the ram of this pc and it came out with no erros. Just now it occurred to me to do a disk check, so i did a I did a diskcheck on this pc and i got error just 2% into it.

Could the mobo be broken or the CPU? Or is it pretty safe to assume its just a faulty harddrive??

 

[olryst]

When you formatted the harddrive did you do full or quick format?

 

[mexicangangsta]

i tried full twice but it stuck on 40% and never moved up an inch. I did quick reformat.

 

[managed]

How big is C ? Is it the only partition on the drive ?

 

[mexicangangsta]

The harddrive is 235GB and yes its the only partition

 

[managed]

If you haven't already try deleting then creating the partition at the start of the install, then format it.

It's a long shot but Vista partitions aren't quite the same as XP ones.so this might help.

Otherwise if you know the make of the hard drive try the maker's website for a disk testing program and run it, most offer these and they can run from a floppy or CD even if Windows isn't installed.

 

[mexicangangsta]

ah well i used the command prompt and used chkdsk and it gave me the error. After this last hiccup i deleted the partition and did a clean install of 7 i got from a friend. Now my only worry is its not just the harddrive thats broken. Can i safely assume that the error its only from the harddrive?? from the previous signs (disk i/o error, unresponsive when trying to extract files/open some programs, sometimes winrar errors).

Again thanks for the answers guys.